Shake-up to bin collection days touted
Some Birmingham residents could be told to put their bins out on different days in a bid by the city council to improve its failing rubbish collection service.
Darren Share, assistant director for Street Scene, admitted there remained problems with the collection rounds following the shake-up from a four to five-day working model last September – a move agreed with unions as part of the resolution to the 2017 bin strike.
He explained that recent improvements to the service had been achieved by tweaks to rounds but stated that ultimately some people’s collection days may have to change to prevent their bins being missed repeatedly.
Recent figures showed that the council’s collection rate between April and July was 99.58 per cent against a target of 99.90 per cent. However that still meant 48,448 collections were missed out of a scheduled 11,575,194.
Mr Share said: “What we are noticing, and the bit that is frustrating especially for residents, is that we are failing at the same point every time.
“So if we have got a round that is going wrong, it goes wrong every week and that’s the bit we are doing, we are working on trying to equalise the days of collection.
“When we started this process of moving from our old operating model to the new operating model we moved every single collection to a different round, we moved from four-day working to five-day working without changing the day of collection to the resident.
“If you take that into consideration we collect around 1.3 million properties every fortnight.
“So we threw everything up in the air and landed it without changing the day of collection and where we are at the moment, we are tweaking the rounds and putting in resources where we can within existing days of collection.
“To finish the final completion rate, we are currently at 99 per cent completion rate, to finish that one per cent we might have to change the day of collection to finish that off, and that’s the piece of work we are doing at the moment, to equalise the days, not just equalise the rounds.”
Mr Share revealed the idea as he addressed the council’s Audit committee last week, as they discussed the recent Local Government Ombudsman report which ordered compensation ranging from £100 to £300 to 17 residents due to persistent missed collections.
