LETTER: At the beginning of October we were told we were to have our refuse collection system changed to fortnightly collection of residual waste in wheelie bins as of then.
I phoned the council to say we had no bins, only to be told there was a delay and we would get our bins at the beginning of November – no bins came.
I had hoped that we would get them for Christmas, but no. We have had no apology or explanation. I have now complained to Shropshire County Council, only to be informed that we won’t get our wheelie bins until the week beginning February 16. The reasons they gave were that there was a fire at the bin makers, and that the delivery vehicle can only carry a limited number of bins at a time. So, a four-and-a-half months’ wait to supply wheelie bins.
We have been expected to use black sacks as before but, whereas previously they were collected weekly, they are now collected fortnightly. Living in a rural area this does create problems as black sacks need to be kept in a rodent proof bin. They expected us to do this without providing us with appropriate bins.
My previous letter of complaint to the council on October 2 about recycling collection of plastics and batteries, which was forwarded to Veolia, has not been answered. I regard all this as a unsatisfactory service for which we are paying.
Katy Rose
Much Wenlock
16 Comments
Welcome to the “real world” of customer service. Contrary to what I see with my own eyes, I’ve been told three times that the broken street lights outside my house that I reported as such in November have been fixed by the contractor. However, at night time, they’re still giving off “black light”! Contracting work out is just another way for council workers with gold-plated jobs and pensions to blame someone else without needing to do anything about it themselves, whilst not worrying about whether we get the services that we pay for or not. One tip: don’t waste your time writing a complaint; unless you’ve missed a council tax payment, the council or their highly-paid contractors are unlikely to be too bothered about you or your situation. Good luck with getting your bins - please keep us informed!
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I live in the country too; they have changed the dates of collection in such a way that everyone is totally confused and we all now have rubbish piling up from Xmas. The real problem is that local & central Govt seem to think they are doing us a favour by providing this service and treat accordingly. We are in reality paying customers and if they were a private organisation I would have sacked them by now for not being fit for purpose.
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To be fair, if there has been an accident at the bin makers there isn’t a huge amount they can do- and if you actually live IN Much Wenlock as you claim to that’s hardly a rural area. We don’t get any rat problems. I’m sure you must have something around your house you can keep the sacks in temporarily? An old box or something?
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And PS at Rodney, working for a council is not so glamourous or well-paid as you might think! The people in charge of Bridgnorth District Council aren’t driving home to mansions every night!
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I sort of believe that they are a private organisation, the local councils and government have outsourced much of the work they used to do to private companies, thus creating a barrier between us the tax rates payer and the real service provider.
When contacting the council you are referred to the real service supplier, I feel this is a get out for the council, who as the local government organisation responsible for the service, should deal with any problems with their agent, rather than washing their hands and forcing us to deal with a third party of their choosing with whom we have no direct influence.
I have a slightly different slant on the problem of outsourcing, as a business my refuse is collected by a different company than normal households. I can understand the idea behind this as I might have separate needs, however as a restaurant my refuses is basically the same as household waste, I therefore do not really need a different service supplier.
Because of my physical location in the county my service provider is forced to make a 36 mile roundtrip just to empty my one bin, this cannot be a profitable operation for the provider, and cannot be good for the environment, but there does not seem to be a reasonable alternative. Which is a shame because the household waste for all the other houses in the village is collected by a different company and business waste is collected by another suppler for a different country less than a ½ mile from me.
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Collecting the “recycling” is a random event, batteries initially, now sometimes but usually just left. The paper was left last week but the glass and tins collected. Why doesn’t plastic get recycled - although perhaps even if it did, it wouldn’t (well may be once at Lent)!!!
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Tut Tut people. Stop moaning. Haven’t you been told in Shropshire yet?
Yoiu job is to serve the council,not them serve you.
The sooner you understand that the easier life becomes
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Robbie Pickles > I don’t for one moment think that they are all living in mansions, (well, not anyone below middle management anyway), but even if they’re all driving home to back-to-backs, it still doesn’t change the fact that the work, though maybe not glamorous, is still gold-plated, along with the tax-payer funded pensions. Of course, that’s nothing to the riches that they disburse liberally to the service contractors without bothering them now and again to actually do the work that they’ve been contracted to do in the first place. Fire at the bin factory? Lorry’s too small to carry the available bins? Well, plenty of competing bin factories in the UK who could supply instead and plenty of “Man in a Van” companies who’d be happy for the work at a fraction of the cost. It’s just if it doesn’t affect the council employees directly, they’re really not interested in bucking their contractors up. So yes, contracting out = blame someone else and don’t worry about giving the “stakeholder” the service that they’ve paid for. No rats? Everyone in UK is at most 10ft from a rat nowadays, Much Wenlock included. Next thing, someone’ll be suggesting that Katy Rose save up all her stinking bags of refuse in a box somewhere in her house for two weeks at a time to keep them away from rodents and cats. Oh, I see someone already has!
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Well there is a solution. If you have no bins and are worried about rodents attacking black bags then make the effort to take your rubbish to the local tip yourself!!! There is one in Telford only 20 mins away and one in bridgnorth less than 10mins away.
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we always used to get such a good service in bridgnorth under the council but ever since its been privatised to this french company its been, in a word, rubbish
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I have to make separate trips to the recycling centre to recycle plastics and batteries which don’t get collected at the kerbside.
Why would this be when surely the council realise that a great deal of packaging is plastic as well as cardboard???
Sneaky thought though…. could it be that the council no longer want to recycle so much now the bottom has fallen out of the recycling ‘business’ (i.e. no money to made for them in this) and instead we have the prospect of two stonking great incinerators on our back doors to burn everything instead?
Who cares about our health when there is money to be made???
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everywhere else in shropshire works well on fortnighlty bins, why are the people of bridgnorth so special??
i do think the council should give bins though because of the vermin sacks issues
once you have a bin though fortnightly bin collection is no bother
im composting at home now and it makes such a massive difference to my waste - i could even go a month i reckon
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It would be great if more people followed amrk h’s excellent example and composted.
Wormeries are also available on the market (Just google Wiggly Wigglers / Original Organics ) for turning household waste into useful nutrients, if you have a garden.
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idon’tbelieveit said ‘the bottom has fallen out of the recycling ‘business’
This is not the case.
See this thread ( http://www.shropshirestar.com/2008/12/30/uk-waste-policy-is-tax-scam/ ) to see that proposition being put to the test.
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I can see a thread questioning the practice of outsourcing the provision of services beginning to develop; this does not just apply to local councils but also to central government.
As a basic concept I cannot see how these practices can be financially efficient from the point of view of the rate payer - we pay our rates to our council in order that it can provide a service. That is not on the surface a profit making arrangement; in that we do not pay rates in order to allow the council to make a profit, but to provide the service.
The council outsourcers the provision of the service to a private company, which must make a profit in order to survive as a commercially viable company.
So in this case, the services of the collection of rubbish has been converted into a business opportunity. The argument advanced for this is that private companies will do the job more efficiently, well we are beginning to realise exactly what that means, yes they can make the service efficient, but only for the good of the business, they have not improved the service but increased the profitability.
In the mean time a layer of administration has been inserted between the rate payer and the real service provider, which is in all cases is a private company which must make a profit, and is employed by the council on our behalf. We have ceased to be the real customer of the service provider our place has been taken by the council.
Rules on recycling have both compounded and hidden the problem, in that there would have been a lot of changes in the manner of collecting rubbish in any case and the extra costs would have to be borne by the rate payer. I am not decrying recycling, only making the point that rubbish has become a commodity something to be processed and sold in order to make a profit. Which I suppose is the point of the recycling exercise, if our rubbish has an intrinsic value it is less likely to be simply discarded. But which of the changes have been introduced in order to facilitate recycling and which for the profitability of the company.
Separating our rubbish into different categories obviously facilitates recycling; I do not see that moving collections from one to two week periods does, that is a direct benefit to the company who have potentially reduced their collection costs.
Of course refuse collection is only one of the services that have been outsourced, nearly all of government and local council provisions that our society used to consider a public service that benefits all of us no matter where we live in the country, have been treated to the same line of reasoning; that the private sector can provide a better service than the public sector, even though in nearly all cases the private sector will only do so by reducing the service to a profit making exercise for private companies.
This in all cases means higher costs to the taxpayer a reduction of the service and the displacement of the taxpayer by the introduction of an added layer of administration and the outsourcing of not only the service but the responsibility and the separation of government accountability from the tax payer.
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A very good analysis there by Ken Adams.
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