Bin report says new system in Swindon ‘poorly planned’ from start
The new system was brought in in November 2023
The change in Swindon Borough Council’s waste collection regime which saw hundreds of thousands of collections missed over weeks and months of disruption was badly planned from the start.
That’s the conclusion of an investigation into the issues which faced the council’s waste and recycling team from the introduction of an entirely new system in November 2023.
For several weeks afterwards, crews collecting both waste and recycling struggled to keep up, especially with the extra recycling, cardboard, in particular, generated by Christmas.
The report, written by Greenlight Commercial & Consulting in June 2024 will be discussed at the Building a Greener Swindon policy committee meeting on Thursday.
It says: “There were multiple issues that accumulated and led to the service disruption experienced in Swindon. These issues were a lack of resource, both in terms of numbers and expertise, a project management approach that was too loose both corporately and at the service level, and a lack of clarity which was rooted in the lack of recognition of the importance of data in a service such as waste.”
The new collection regime, which saw weekly food waste collection rolled out across the borough, saw rotas redrawn, changes to how recycling was to be put out, and a new fleet of lorries purchased.
But a lack of money was one of the major issues with the entire plan. The report says: “With continuing year-on-year reductions in government funding, a cost-of-living crisis and recent inflation challenges, councils require astute financial management and cutting-edge commerciality to safeguard and enhance service delivery for the future.
“Major projects such as new service rollouts present a particular challenge for resource-poor councils. Does the council spend the little resource it has on additional support for a new service rollout, or does it use its existing resource to meet this challenge on top of the day-to-day challenge of ongoing service delivery?
“We have observed that the routine approach taken by many councils is to try to use existing resources. This poses an obvious challenge, owing to the pressures already on that existing resource.”
The report says that was Swindon’s approach and says it was a poor choice.
It says the staff resource for the programme was too little, and when two senior staff left, there was a general lack of knowledge of the whole waste and recycling system.
The report says that the council was operating with poor data, with up to at least 1,000 households possibly missing from rounds, the council’s records on where houses were had kept pace with the borough’s growth.
And it says of the cabinet meeting in 2021 which approved moving ahead with the scheme: “There is a discernible lack of figures in the report.
“There is no description or, better still, a Financial Model of the full costings of the services or how these are arrived at. Including the cost of inflation that needed to be allowed for on the service would have presented a more accurate impression of costs. Overall, there needed to be an enhanced commercial and financial analysis of the options considered.”
The report was commissioned by Councillor Chris Watts, who took over the cabinet waste portfolio in May 2023, after the previous administration had agreed to change the system in late 2021, and just a few months before it was brought in.
He said: “The point of the report is not really to find out what went wrong, but to identify the problems with the council’s project management and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.
“It’s clear that we should not go into major £10m reorganisations without making sure that we have adequate resources and the right skills, and that we need to learn this at the director level.”
“If we don’t have the right resources, it is better not to proceed with a project than deliver it badly.”