Recycling and garden waste that would have been collected on 19 September and garden waste that would have been collected on 20 September will not be collected due to the Bank Holiday for the Queen’s Funeral.
In response to queries from residents, Cllr Stephen Fenton asked the council’s Waste team about whether additional waste will be collected that is presented on 3rd & 4th October and whether consideration was given to arranging ‘catch-up’ collections. The response received is copied below.
“The arrangements around the State Funeral have had an impact on waste operations. The service’s priority was to ensure that we could collect as much waste as possible and therefore a number of options were considered.
Our priority has to be that all household waste [black bins] are collected as we have a statutory duty to collect such waste. To ensure that we can recover all household waste it has meant we have had to take the tough decision to stand garden waste collections down on Tuesday 20th September and not collect garden waste or recycling which was scheduled to be collected on 19th September. The garden waste collection service started earlier this year and does run until 2nd December (last day of collection) so there are still ample opportunities for residents to dispose of their garden waste through the kerbside service.
Additional recycling can be presented on Monday 3rd October and our crews will take any additional material presented. On Monday 3rd and indeed on Tuesday 4th October (garden waste), we will ensure that all additional material is collected and will look at having pro-active support in place to ensure that all rounds complete and recover any additional materials presented.
One of the options we did consider was moving all waste collections in the week beginning 19th September back one day and working on Saturday 24th September (e.g. to collect Monday’s waste on Tuesday, Tuesday’s waste on Wednesday etc). Discussions were held with the workforce but (i) they are not contractually obliged to work on that Saturday and (ii) with the short notice of the bank holiday a number of staff already had plans/commitments and indicated they would not be able to work. Therefore, we would have struggled to get enough staff into work on Saturday 24th September and therefore, there would have been the very real probability that we would have not been able to deliver household waste collections on that day let alone any garden waste or recycling collections.
For information, on the five ‘standard’ bank holidays, waste collection staff are contracted to work on these days (but this does not cover one off or unique events such as the state funeral). We also considered options for collecting more waste in the following week but we do not have a whole fleet of ‘spare’ vehicles or indeed staff and we could never catch up that level of collections.”