Council learns lessons from 'mistakes' in rollout of green waste service

Council officers said lessons have been learned from the heavily-criticised rollout of a new chargeable garden waste collection service.

Residents in Middlesbrough reported problems trying to sign up due to clogged phone lines to the contact centre and there was confusion over the collection dates for the old green bins. There were also issues with online calendars while 1,300 orders were not processed due to a "glitch in the system".

At a Middlesbrough Council environment scrutiny panel meeting on Monday, environment and community services director Geoff Field said: "There has been some mistakes made within the process - we hold our hands up and say that. The mistakes that happened weren't the ones we expected to happen but that's the way it worked."

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The distribution of brown garden bins was part of a shake-up of waste collection services in the town, which also includes a move to fortnightly household waste collections in July. Take-up was significantly higher than expected with around 20,000 residents subscribing compared to a first-year projection of 9,300.

So far just under 20,000 new brown waste bins have been delivered and 25,000 old green bins have been collected. "It's been more popular than we thought it was going to be," said Mr Field.

"The take-up was 41 per cent which is double what we expected and even in our wildest dreams we would never expected that level." Estimates were based on figures from other councils' experiences, including at Hartlepool and Darlington. he said.

"It wasn't just a figure in the air, it was based on experiences others have had," he said. "We have got a higher take-up than any council I have talked to.

"I remember the council meetings that we were in where there were lots of comments by councillors who said it would be a really low take-up and there would be loads of fly-tipping. There wasn't one person banging on my door saying, 'you've completely under-estimated this Geoff, we need to buy more bins'."

He admitted they were "conservative" in the order but said if he had been "aggressive" and over-ordered it would have been a worse outcome for the cash-strapped council. The service will provide an expected income for the council of £800,000 in 2024 and 2025, which Mr Field said would help narrow the £7.5m funding gap for the council in 2025/26.

He said overall, the service has had a ""good outcome". "I think it shows the commitment of the people in Middlesbrough to do the right thing with their waste which is fantastic and we are really grateful to all those people who have signed up to the service," he said. "It's good for the environment and it's good for the council."

The "Monday" email

An email was distributed with an image saying Middlesbrough Council would collect the old green bins "from Monday". However, the email went on to state the image is an example of the leaflet which would later be delivered to each household, confirming when the green bins will actually be removed.

This led to confusion with many people putting their green bins out for collection the following Monday. The local authority has used social media to clarify the situation while urging residents not to put their bins out until they receive a leaflet confirming the actual date of collection.

When asked what they would do differently in terms of communication strategies, head of marketing ad communications, Andrew Glover said: "We had an over-reliance on digital communications so we need to think more about those who are not online or don't access the service digitally."

Regarding the email which confused some residents over the collection date, he said: "We probably need to think, 'does that pass the glance test?' With the benefit of hindsight we wouldn't have done it like that."

Contact centre issues and delays in deliveries

Regarding issues with the contact centre, he said they didn't expect so many inquiries but more resources have been established with a second centre fielding calls. Due to the delays in deliveries, two free collections have been added, beginning in March next year, to subscribers to the new garden waste collection scheme.

Mr Field told the panel that, due to the seasonality of garden waste, they had "a very short window to get this in from you guys [councillors] pressing the button on March 8." More than 40 working days in, they are starting too the "back-end" of it now," he said.

"Overall I think people have been patient but I understand some of the pressures the councillors have been under during the rollout," he said. "It wasn't a situation we would want to be in but hopefully you can see some of the things we were going through in service land to try to get it rolled out as quickly as possible and efficiently as possible in the very short window we had.

"The team has been putting in 12 to 14 hour days on this and I am incredibly grateful for what they have done. They have done an amazing job as far as I'm concerned of what was a very complex task that's been of a bigger size than we ever anticipated. That's not to say that we don't learn from what's went wrong, because we do."

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