Transcript

Yeah, Morning everyone.

Can everyone hear?

OK, Yeah, lovely.

All right, Jess and I are hopefully going to share our experience of introducing the chargeable garden waste for you today, focusing on what went well and what didn’t.

So if anybody is thinking of introducing the scheme, hopefully that’ll be of some benefit for you.

So to begin with, we’ll just give you some context about what started our journey into a chargeable scheme.

And then Jess will pick up the system changes, the IT changes that had to be made, the payment options and the types we considered.

And then the pros and cons of direct debits, which is a nemesis for most people and their systems.

So hopefully, again, that will help.

So like most councils, I need to charge was driven by finance.

We’re one of seven districts in Leicestershire, A2 tier authority with the County Council being the disposal authority.

And in 2015 the disposal authority cancelled the recycling credits for compostable waste which left the budget deficit of 350,000.

So that started our talks about how that was going to be met and one of those possibilities at the time was to introduce a charge for garden waste.

So in 2015, sixteen politically those nerves about introduced and was charged for that.

So that was met from our reserves.

October 15 when we’re looking at estimates for 2:16, there’s still no decision made.

And by February 16, when council due to meet to set the budget, there was still uncertainty right up to that point whether the charge would be introduced again due to political concerns.

So the decision was made to go ahead, which left the service with six weeks.

So quite a short time scale to introduce that.

So as you can imagine, we I think about live to tell the tale.

We’re here today.

So things that will help you, if we could turn back time, things that we’d do again.

I’ll ignore the first four for now because we’re going to come on to that in the next slides.

So vehicles slim to air warships, you’ve heard, I think they’ve reduced, managed to reduce one vehicle.

I would advise not to rush into doing that.

Your colleagues in finance will have a nice smile on the face when they’re thinking more money and less vehicles, less staff.

With the price that we pitched at, we had high demand and we got 76% take up and lost only about 1900 tonnes.

So just bear that one in mind.

Bin stickers are a must.

Am I saying the right things, John?

So yes, bin bin stickers are almost certainly in rural councils.

You’re going to have terraced properties, you’re going to have Cody sacs.

And even with the telematic system that we’ve introduced subsequently, the crews cannot determine which bin belongs to which house.

And believe me, you will have as many complaints for emptying bins without stickers as you do generally about the service as well, because residents are quite precious about that.

A longer lead time, as long as you can.

We had a very short window.

I’ll let Jess take you through the DSTLS systems challenges.

And that was a key issue to get the systems ready on time.

Again with Airwash multi service project team, absolute must the contact centre customer services team as soon as this we announced, we’re very nervous about handling the amount of calls, both online take up and telephone calls went up massively as you’d expect with the introduction of new service.

You need to plan for that.

Finance need to be involved for the financial systems, which brings us nicely on to the last one, which is to have a systems officer.

So sometimes when you have a project, you ask the ICT for a brief and what you always get back is not always what you ask for.

Luckily we have an interpreter in the name of Jess who was a seasoned waste management officer, so she understood the service well, the benefit also, she was also the systems admin officer for the waste management team.

So just as well as progressed and and continues to do so into systems integration, customer focused services specifically for waste management.

And if you’ve got someone like that just to make the gel between the project team, between the finance systems, the ICT people, then you’ll hopefully ensure you get something the customer wants and as usable.

So that was really quite key.

So as well as being a statutory duty, the consultation helped members.

As long as you ask the right questions, you’ve asked the people whether they want a free service, they’re going to say yes.

So we’ve pitched the consultation around what would you be prepared to pay.

So there’s some reassurance that four Centre residents come back said they were willing to pay £35.

Hinkley and Bosworth is allowed taxable authority, 10th lowest in the country.

So we have to be proportionate.

We’re not in the dizzy heights of the South where we’re going to charge £70 a collection and also look over your borders.

So the members did not want to be the highest charging council within the Shire.

So we looked at our neighbouring councils to see what they were charging, benchmark with them as well as nationally, and we ended up with a charge of around 24 lbs, which was the cheapest in Leicestershire, which members were happy with, and the take up, as I say, went straight to 76%.

So that was really good news.

The other benefit of having people on the scheme that want to be on the scheme and are paying for it is the quality of material went to a, we’ve got a local windrow composting facility on a local farm who spread locally and they were over the moon because the quality certainly shot up as well.

So that was a OK, the service itself then needs to be simple.

Our systems, I could say antiquated, they probably were and probably still are.

Getting the systems of finance systems to talk to the customer services system to talk to the waste management system was a real challenge.

So the more variable was you have in that, the worse it’s going to be.

So because the price was so low at 24 lbs, it was decided no concessions, SO1 price, no concessions for benefits, which meant just one price across the board, no periods other than 12 month subscription.

If you use this the service all year, it’s 24 lbs.

If you use it for six months, it’s 24 lbs.

And again, that just helped get the systems in quick and make it as simple as possible.

I won’t go through these individually, but similar again to air wash the the usual suspects, the council tax law reaches every household.

The other ones you I won’t, I won’t go through because we’ve already mentioned most of those through through air wash.

Pre empting your complaints and formal complaints was really useful.

We scripted every possible complaint we could imagine that we were going to get and had scripts for the contact centre and the waste officers as well for the more complex complaints.

And that was really useful for consistency Cos as you can imagine, people try every angle.

But at least we had a consistent response, and that seemed to drill down on the number of complaints quite quickly.

We still had a lot, but at least we’re saying the same thing, right?

I’ll introduce Jess just to talk about some of the issues we’ve had with systems now and the challenges around that.

Hi, can everybody hear me?

Oh, this is a bit weird.

I feel like I’m at a bingo hall.

So as Darren kind of explained, I’m sort of the bridge that sits between waste and IT.

I’ve been in waste about 17 years, so starting off from the base at the customer point.

So I understand what customers want and what they need, but I also understand our systems in waste.

We use Capsidox, the uniform system, which if anybody is used to it, you’ll know that it doesn’t talk to anybody or like any other system at all.

And our finance system is Capita, which our initial problems were obviously the the two would not talk to each other.

We have a very good guy in our contracted IT team who was able to write as a lot of coding to get between the two.

When we first started out, we had an online form.

The resident would complete that to say that they wanted to subscribe.

That would integrate into our uniform system and tell us that the resident wanted to to subscribe to the service.

What it couldn’t do was take the payment before that point of integration.

So we had a massive problem whereby the resident moved on to the second step of the form, which was the payment, but we’d already been notified that they wanted to subscribe.

We went a long time with that system before we could find a way to put the two together.

Initially we thought it was going to be really easy because both systems would send us an e-mail and we could just match up the addresses in the e-mail to make sure the resident had actually followed through and paid in the second stage.

But with the amount of people that we had subscribed in, those emails were miles away from each other.

We couldn’t find them.

So there was a risk that somebody could say they wanted the service and then not follow through and make the payment.

We did eventually work with a guy from IT who managed to put a patch together and create just one form where both things would happen at the same time.

But that was a really difficult place to get to.

The systems did not want to talk to each other, and we’re just really lucky that we had somebody in IT that was able to do it.

So I would say first and foremost, these systems, other than the operational issues, your systems may be your biggest barrier to making sure that this works.

We also had issues with online capacity because we had obviously thousands and thousands of people going online to subscribe.

We didn’t expect that take up all the speed at which they did it.

So our online systems did struggle.

We had times when they crashed, we had to extend licences for various pieces of software.

There was a lot going on and because we only had six weeks to bring this in, it was all quite unknown that that was going to happen.

So we were constantly having to redesign things and change the way to keep up with what the residents were trying to do.

We did have a huge alliance on key staff.

So as I said, the guy in IT and myself, we were really the the two that were kind of working it through and trying to put it together.

We started off just with card payments.

I guess that’s where everybody starts.

But when you have when you come around to renewal time and you’ve got 32,000 people needing to make another card payment for a service, it’s really quite a lot of traffic that’s going through your authority.

We do have a lot that goes online.

So there’s less impact on the contact centre, but still that is a lot of people and we knew quite early on that we wanted to get to direct debit even though we didn’t quite know how to do it.

We sent out paper direct debit mandates with the first set of stickers, which obviously thousands of people completed, and then we manually inputted them into our finance system capital to put people on to direct debit.

It was a massive undertaking and we had a lot of extra staffing to facilitate that because there’s just no way of doing like an automatic renewal with card payments.

Our systems couldn’t do that.

I don’t know if anybody else’s can, but to get that auto renew, it had to be as a direct debit.

So that was the way we wanted to go.

What I would say is the pros of direct debit is obviously you only have to set it up once and then it rolls on every year.

And we’ve found really good ways to manage that both with Permiserve for the permits themselves and with our in cab system that we’ve introduced in the last few years.

So more or less everything that we do now is automated and quite streamlined and simple.

And that comes from having I think we’ve got about 22,000 people on direct debit.

So they just automatically renew, they don’t have to contact us.

Makes life a lot easier and residents are used to using direct debits, so they are quite good at just setting it up and it it rolling on.

Plus they to use a direct debit, they have to be signed up to our Hinkley account.

So we’ve got their e-mail address, we can contact them if there’s service issues or whatever.

But there are some downsides to direct debits.

We personally have a fixed renewal date.

It is the 1st of April.

I do know of another council that the direct debit renews whenever the residents signed up.

But to us that’s, that’s very administration heavy and very complicated.

So the direct debit regardless of when you pay for your service or you’ll start your service renews again on the 1st of April.

We do have problems with residents cancelling their direct debit because they’ll look at their online banking or their bank account, they’ll see something that they don’t recognise and it’s still quite a low price and they probably think, oh, what’s that?

And then they cancel it.

And then they contact us after April and say, why haven’t I had my permit?

And we say because you’ve cancelled your direct debit and you haven’t paid.

But that does happen quite a lot.

We also have some issues where people, if they move out of the borough or move within the borough, forget that they’ve got the direct debit set up for the brown bin.

We can end up sending a permit out to a property that they no longer live at.

We have a lot of instances where people will tell council tax where they’ve moved to, but that information is not currently shared with Waste Management.

We are trying to get to that point, but obviously there’s GDPR to get around and various things.

So residents do sometimes tell one department and it doesn’t work its way back to us.

We try to remind them on websites if you’re moving or leaving.

Remember if you’ve got a garden bin, you need to tell the waste department.

We initially sent permits out before we collected the direct debits.

Of course, that can result in people getting the permit and cancelling the direct debit and then you chase some debt.

Not ideal.

So we have changed that around now we take the direct debits first and post the permits out after for the people that actually made the payment, where we know the payment has gone through successfully.

We have also just changed you can set up direct debits online with us, but again, when it’s set up, it may be up to about six weeks before that direct debit is actually taken and the permit may have gone out before then.

So we have changed that to be an initial card payment, which then turns into a direct debit for the following year.

And again, that’s all automated.

So yeah, I think that’s kind of the overview of the systems.

OK, Thanks, Jess.

So we looked at some of the things that may help you to do, but some of the things that we wouldn’t do again certainly wouldn’t post out stickers.

That first year back in 2016, there wasn’t a facility.

We did that in the house and staff were taking stickers home and the kids were posting them at night for us.

So luckily there’s a, a facility available now print and pack service wouldn’t implement before systems are ready.

We had a time barrier to do that, but would would say take your time and get the systems right.

Just as highlighted a lot of issues that we had to wade through and that took time and we had to evolve that rather than having it right at entry point.

And don’t underestimate the amount of staff just to kick it off.

So we, we toured up the contact centre and even now each renewal we’ve been getting stuff into the contact centre through that renewal.

Because we know the hits go up.

So that’s an ongoing resource that you need and how many people cancel the direct debits in error.

I’ve just as highlighted on that as well, there’s no online facility that we’ve got.

So people can check still happens every year and it still takes a lot of resource for staff to try and pull that together between the finance staff and and our systems and waste as well.

So four key points which will hopefully help for a focus.

So where we started from and where we are now, 2016 we did have a a good take up mainly due to the price entry point being low at 76%.

We’ve maintained that as you see in January around 78% and we’re holding that now for this renewal that we’ve just gone through this year at January it was £37.50.

That price went up in April to £42.50.

So still a relatively low charge from where we’ve started from.

Again, tonnage overall has varied or or or not gone down below 2000 tonnes taking account it’s seasonal and we’ve had some warm summers in the last few years.

We’re still doing 8 to 9000 tonnes whereas before we’re doing 10 or 11,000 tonnes pre charge.

And as I said earlier, that was a key point.

Quality went right up S That was a good news story for the local site.

All right.

Thanks very much.

That brings us to the end.