Forty bin staff sick after Christmas

The absences, on December 30 and December 31, came despite the fact many refuse collectors had already had the previous five days off.

Birmingham City Council was prompted to apologise for missed collections approaching New Year and directed residents to its five household recycling centres, whilst acknowledging some of the sites were already busy.

Reacting to the issues the opposition Conservatives described the bin service as "shambolic" arguing the increase in sickness was "entirely predictable".

But bins chief Councillor John O’Shea defended the service saying there were a number of issues during what was already the ‘most challenging’ period for collections.

The number of absences were confirmed in a response to a written question at Tuesday's full council meeting. They meant eight wagons were unable to complete rounds on December 30 and nine wagons the following day.

Staff had been given December 25, and December 26, off for Christmas Day and Boxing Day as normal.

The council had also decided to cancel normal collections for December 27 to honour the ‘high volume of requests from staff to take time off’, although some workers did turn up and were re-assigned to pick up missed collections and black bags.

Then all refuse collectors were off as usual for the following weekend – December 28 and December 29.

Despite the post-Christmas issues there were 345 missed collections reported in the final week of 2019, which is the lowest recorded in the last six years.

Nevertheless Councillor Deirdre Alden, shadow member for the bin service, said: “At a time when other councils were putting on extra collections to cope with increased demand, Birmingham Labour increased the number of days they didn’t collect, carried out less collections and failed to complete the ones they planned because of the entirely predictable increase in sickness, which seems to happen every Christmas period in the service, unlike other departments.

“The people of Birmingham deserve better than this shambolic service.

“I dread to think what things would have been like had we had any bad weather over the festive period.

“For many residents Labour decided their Christmas present to the city would be rubbish piled up on our streets yet again”.

Group leader Rob Alden said some residents had gone without a recycling collection for around four weeks and accused the council of failing to learn from past Christmases.

But issuing a full response to the criticism Councillor O’Shea said: “The Christmas and New Year period is always our most challenging because we need to achieve the right balance between ensuring the most reliable service possible whilst ensuring our hard-working crews get time with their families and loved ones.

“The crews do work all other Bank Holidays during the year – including New Year’s Day.

“Following discussions with the workforce and mindful there was only one working day after December 25-26 and before the weekend, we decided not to schedule collections on December 27.

“This was widely communicated in advance.

“Our scheduled collections the following week were then impacted by a number of factors – not just the staff sickness and absence referred to by opposition councillors.

“We also faced issues, as we do on a daily basis, with access to roads blocked by vehicles and breakdowns affecting some of our wagons.

“We apologised at the time for any collections that were impacted by these issues – the new vehicles coming this year will help improve reliability across the board.”

He added: “Christmas is always our busiest time as we face a 30 per cent increase in the amount of waste left for collection and it has always taken a few weeks to catch up.

“Because of the hard work by our crews, we had already reduced missed collections to the lowest level for a number of years.

“We are confident that we will also complete that catch-up work faster than in previous years.

“While we know that we have work still to do, the service is getting better and I wish that the opposition councillors could take a little time out to recognise the progress that we have made.”