Agenda item

The Council’s Director of My Place (DMP) delivered an update on the ‘Improving Household Waste, Recycling and Street Cleaning’ Scrutiny Review Recommendations. The scrutiny review had previously been agreed by the Committee at their 4 September 2019 meeting (minute 15 refers).

Progress had been made against many of the 10 recommendations originally put forward by the Committee, however others had been put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The DMP also updated the Committee as to future plans to continue to respond to the recommendations, such as through the SMART Street proposal, which was a cross-council initiative set up to make visible, measurable improvements to the high levels of waste and low levels of recycling in the Borough, as well as improve its cleanliness and appearance.

The Chair stated that one of the major points to arise from the original scrutiny review was that a lot of waste was being produced by HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) and landlord properties, highlighting the need for more collaborative work to be undertaken. A further update on Recommendations 3, 4 and 5 was also scheduled to be presented at the 12 May 2021 Committee meeting and the Chair thanked the Waste, Enforcement and Communications teams for their work so far.

In response to several questions, the DMP stated that:

• A daily report as to the locations of missed bins was received and the team would then need to pick these up within 24 hours. The team had recently begun work to track missed bins on a monthly basis, to gain an insight as to whether these missed bins were occurring at the same property or street and it was envisioned that this work would be developed further in the long-term;
• The Council needed more evidence that they had gone back to a resident to tell them if they had not been able to collect their bin due to contamination. Whilst the Council could write to the resident, this work was a longer-term enforcement issue that the team wished to address after the pandemic. It could often prove difficult to tackle the problem, as the Council would receive phone calls from residents to say that their bin had been missed, with the binmen then stating that they had not been able to collect due to contamination. The DMP also stated that the team was currently procuring in-cab technology for the Waste Crews, which would provide real-time bin collection information that could then be fed back into the Contact Centre once the IT was set up. This work was due to be completed in 2021; and
• The team had requested tenant information (to be distributed by managing agents to new tenants with refuse and recycling information) from the Private Licensing team and that the team needed to monitor how the landlords passed this information on. The DMP did not yet have the evidence that this had been done. The Waste Minimisation team had been asked to undertake this task, but landlords had not been forthcoming with this information during the pandemic.

The Head of Regulatory Services advised that the Regulatory Services team conducted a compliance inspection on the respective property when they received a licence application from a landlord. As part of the information that the team provided with the licence, the team informed the landlord and tenant of their responsibilities in relation to waste provision and collection dates. Compliance Officers had also been instructed to go through the conditions of the licence when they visited tenants and conducted inspections, highlighting what good tenants looked like, collection dates, how rubbish should be disposed and information around bulky waste and flytipping. 

In response to several questions, the DMP stated that daily missed bin updates were currently shared with the Contact Centre. If a resident was to telephone the Council, their missed bin information would be checked and it would be added to the system if it was not already present.

Members noted that the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) still provided weekly recycling collections, whereas many other boroughs did not. LBBD bins were much larger than those in other local authority areas and that in these other areas, some of the positive behaviour change that had arisen had been due to having smaller bins, along with fortnightly collections, which had led more people to recycle.