Waste Services In 'Complete Meltdown' Say Brighton And Hove councillors

Weeks of missed bin and garden waste collections have left two councillors inundated with emails complaining about the poor service.

Brighton and Hove Independent councillor Mark Earthey said that the service appeared to be in “complete meltdown” as a flood of resident in Rottingdean and West Saltdean email him saying that their bins have not been emptied again.

Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons said that residents were just leaving their brown garden waste bins out in Westdene and Hove Park ward because they haven’t been emptied for six weeks.

Brighton and Hove City Council charges people who sign up for garden waste collections.

Residents in both wards appear to have given up using the council’s Contact Your Councillor web portal to reach their representatives.

Now they are emailing the two councillors directly, with both saying that they have received hundreds of complaints about missed collections in recent weeks.

Councillor Earthey said:

“We get the same old excuse over and over again. Some of them are getting quite colourful now. If it was comedy or something like Little Britain, you’d laugh.

“A resident the other day got one that said: ‘We didn’t collect your garden rubbish because the team were reassigned to gritting the roads because of the recent frost.’

“That wasn’t February. That was the frost from a couple of weeks ago in March.

“The other was the managing agents didn’t mark the bin stores properly so we didn’t know there were any bins there.”

Councillor Earthey said that there were missed collection hot spots but the area was growing, including Wilkinson Close and Vaughn Williams Way, one of the new streets of houses on the site of the old St Aubyns School, in Rottingdean.

There were more at the top of Saltdean, he said, including Coombe Rise, Coombe Vale and Tumulus Road.

Councillor Earthey’s own bin has also been missed out. He lives in one of 15 streets that seem to be missed regularly by Cityclean, the council’s rubbish and recycling service.

Councillor Lyons said that his residents were receiving a standard email saying that workers were off sick. He wanted to know what was being done to resolve the issue with garden waste.

He said:

“It’s collapsed. No garden waste collection for six weeks (in) multiple roads. It’s not just a couple of roads. It seems to be the whole ward.

“Residents feel they are being fobbed off. The service is quite expensive. It’s doubled in cost in the last few years but the number of missed collections has increased exponentially.

“I’ve never had so many emails on one particular topic and I thought the weeds would be the most communications.

"I’ve had 14 emails from residents overnight. I’ve submitted more than 100.”

The council said that there were two garden waste rounds in winter and three in summer, each with a driver and two loaders.

It said that there was a rolling cycle of vehicle replacement and two were due to arrive this month for the wider Cityclean fleet to increase reliability, with more on order.

Sickness levels had been higher in recent weeks but the council did not say what percentage of staff were unavailable for work.

With new housing, the council said that it was not always told when people had moved in.

And some developers were reluctant to mark bin stores, making them hard to find.

Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, the council’s cabinet member for net zero and environmental services, said:

“Unfortunately, in some areas our collections have recently not been as reliable as they should have been and I’d like to apologise to residents for the disruption to their service.

“We are working hard to make fundamental and systemic improvements in this area but, while this work continues, there will unfortunately be times where unforeseen problems will test the resilience of our service.

“Recently we have had high levels of sickness, which has had a particular impact on garden waste, but we are in the process of adding additional resources to prevent this happening in future.

“I’m also aware of some disruption to recycling in the Saltdean and Rottingdean area and would like to reassure residents that steps have been taken to address this.

“We are determined to make lasting and transformational changes to our collections service, including replacing our older vehicles with new ones and modernising the systems we use to manage the service.

“The outdated paper-based system we inherited is being replaced with a fully integrated digital system that will enable the team to reallocate collections in real time, manage the service much more efficiently and, crucially, provide much better information for residents.

“Our residents rightly expect a quality service and that is what we are focused on delivering.”