Denbighshire Council's £640k overspend after recycling rollout

Denbighshire Council has spent an additional £640,000 since the rollout of the new Trolibocs system in early June, trying to keep up with a large number of missed collections.

The council has even resorted to “co-mingling” waste, with bin men remixing recycling that has already been pre-washed and separated by residents in line with the new Trolibocs system.

The £640,000 overspend has paid for overtime, agency staff, and hiring extra vehicles.

The local authority has received a one-off receipt of £1.2m from the North Wales Waste Treatment Partnership and plans to spend £1.067m of the funds “fixing” the broken recycling scheme.

The funding will be used to “offset the costs” of recruiting extra agency staff, paying for overtime, and hiring extra vehicles, minimising the need for such future measures.

And a new plan will be put in place with additional collection rounds within weeks of a special council meeting to be held next week – if the proposal is agreed.

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The report states: “The decision sought by this report will enable the waste service to implement the amended waste collection routes placing the service on a more sustainable basis and reducing the current levels of expenditure.

“It is important that this work commences without delay.

“It is for this reason that cabinet is being asked to confirm that the decision be implemented immediately.”

The Local Democracy Reporting Service spoke to council leader Cllr Jason McLellan about the issue, together with Cllr Barry Mellor, cabinet member for recycling, chief executive Graham Boase, and corporate director Tony Ward.

“We all accept that the new waste and recycling service hasn’t worked as we envisaged.

“There is now a member-led, councillor-led scrutiny, a full review which will look into the reasons why,” said Cllr McLellan.

“Now I’m welcoming that review. I instigated that with Barry (Cllr Mellor), and the public will be involved in that review.

“We responded to the large number of missed collections by quickly allocating the necessary additional temporary resources to address the issues.

“That’s what we did. It was the right thing to do, and it worked.

“But we now need to put in place a permanent solution to enable the service to be successful and sustainable.”

Cllr Barry Mellor added: “As the lead member, a lot of the responsibility comes back to me, and it is evident that, in the planning for the new service, insufficient resources were allocated for those recycling rounds.

“It was simply just not enough resources to complete all the recycling collections across the county, and there is no avoiding the fact that a permanent fix does require allocating additional resources to the service.

“The proposal being brought to cabinet on October 1 provides that permanent fix.

“Without formerly allocating additional resources, as proposed, we could either keep allocating additional resources on a day-to-day basis in the way we’ve been doing to address the issues.

“But this is very inefficient and very much more expensive than the proposal to fix (the problem).

“We could allocate no additional resources at all, which will simply result in a large number of missed collections every week, with no way of catching up, but we don’t really want to go back to that scenario.

“So neither of those options can be supported.

“We could consider returning to the old blue bin system, but that also is not practical.

“The cost of implementing the change would far exceed the cost of the proposal to fix.

“Welsh Government would require repayment of significant grants further adding to our costs.

“Disposing of co-mingled recycling material will continue to cost year on year, and the differential between that cost and selling kerbside separated recycling material will grow and grow.”

Cllr Mellor added: “The real risks (are) that our recycling rates won’t increase and the possibility of paying fines for not achieving the national recycling targets (will increase), so this is why we are taking this proposal to cabinet on October 1.”

When asked why the rollout had failed, chief executive Graham Boase said again it would be for the review to decide.

Cllr McLellan added: “We wouldn’t want to pre-empt that (scrutiny process) now, and that is very much going to be led by the non-cabinet members, the back benchers, with public involvement, a full scrutiny of the process from the decisions made right along the line through to the rollout as to the reasons why it didn’t work, and we’d be the first to admit that.”

Cllr Mellor claimed the new recycling scheme had been a massive undertaking.

“This has been the biggest change the council has had to make,” he said.

“We are talking about 46,000 homes within the county. That’s why I have been on the record, Graham (Boase), Tony (Ward), and Jason (Cllr McLellan), to apologise to the public.

“We don’t want to carry on apologising. We want to get things right, and we are determined to make that happen.”

The matter will be debated at the special cabinet meeting on Tuesday, October 1.