Transcript

Yes.

So I entitled this launching a garden waste service the Erewash way.

Essentially I started at Erewash a year ago and since since being there, we’ve basically transformed all of our IT systems.

We’ve implemented a new waste management system with whitespace, so that’s in cab technology as well as the whole kind of back office systems which were all paper based when I started there.

We’ve also implemented a new or are implementing a new trade waste system as well and we’ve procured a recycling contract and obviously looking at food waste infrastructure too.

So there’s been a lot going on as well as launching a garden waste service.

So Airwash for anybody who has heard of Airwash located in South East Derbyshire, we neighbour on to Derby City, Amber Valley and Nottinghamshire authorities too.

We’ve got 53, well just over 53,000 households.

We are a mix of urban and rural areas with two large towns, Ilkeston and Long Eaton and then 15 villages as well and rural areas in between.

We offer a fortnightly collection of of, of waste.

So alternating with garden and recycling one week and obviously a general waste the other week.

So that’s we have the M1 that runs through that’s where we asked are located in the country.

Just a little bit background there.

Is that OK on there?

Just check it out.

So, yeah, so I just wanted to whiz through basically our sort of timeline very quickly on how we implemented our garden waste service, which started on the 1st of April this year.

So we essentially set up a project team, which I’m sure, you know, it’s the basis of most projects.

This team was really important in our in our scheme.

We had officers from all different areas of the council, the finance team, you know, the IT team which were critical.

Obviously waste management and you know all, all manner of people were involved with that.

And that was critical in terms of getting the IT systems, the online forms set up in time.

We completed an environmental, sorry, a quality impact assessment in August was one of the other steps we did.

We got our formal approval process happened in October.

We were thinking that it was going to be just the exec exec who could actually approve, but it was decided to take it to the full council.

Once that was in the pipeline, we were looking at the procurement of a permit provider.

We’d looked at other authorities and really felt that we wanted someone to deliver that for us rather than us having to do anything in house, which other neighbouring authorities did do.

So at that time we were also running that procurement exercise ready for when we got the formal approval process, you know, stamped.

We went straight out for the permit contract.

We were slightly ahead of the government announcing their decision on garden waste collections.

Erewash had decided that we, we were going to go for a chargeable scheme even if we ran it for a year and then it was pulled essentially they, they were very supportive and they really wanted obviously, the benefits of having a garden waste scheme even for a year.

We, yeah, communications started in November.

Once we’d got the formal approval process, we started to warm residents up to the idea that we were going to start charging.

So that ran obviously continuously until the launch of the scheme and after the launch of the scheme as well in in April.

Obviously behind all of that work we were working with our permit provider who was appointed in January.

So we had a very tight window really of having our permit provider in place and the IT associated with some of that set up.

And we opened our subscription scheme in the end of January.

And so people could register and pay for their subscriptions.

They didn’t receive their permits straight away.

It they, they came nearer the launch date, but obviously we were gathering data, people were able to subscribe.

So in March, we started to send out the permits and then obviously it launched on the 1st of April when the actual collections began.

So that’s just a very quick overview of our sort of timeline.

In terms of our communications campaign, obviously critical when you’re making a change to a service.

It’s actually probably the biggest campaign that Erewash Borough Council has actually ever done.

So we spent about 25 K on it All in all, did a variety of well, we threw everything at it essentially.

You can see from there all of the things that we did, which I know is is pretty bug standard really in terms of communications campaigns.

But they really wanted to go all out on that.

Just to give you some detail on in terms of we did a film, for example, which was a very simple film all about really where to stick your sticker on your bin, which sounds like it’s quite a, you know, very detailed thing.

So we did kind of think would people feel that we were just like telling them the obvious how to stick a sticker on a bin.

But actually that received over 48,000 reaches on our Facebook and Instagram, which I think was probably a record for the council.

So a lot of people looked at that video.

I don’t know what they thought about it, but at least they’d seen it.

Yeah.

So we did all of those things.

Press releases we did, we chose to do a leaflet to every household, which obviously is quite an expensive way of communicating, but it the council believed that they wanted everybody to know about this scheme.

Obviously social media ran all the time in the background, lots of posts.

We did paid radio adverts as well, banners in the town hall and we followed up essentially with A tag on our black bin, which is our general waste bin.

That was just before the launch of the scheme.

Again, they just felt they wanted to let everybody know about the scheme.

There was going to be no doubt that once the 1st of April came and your green, green bin wasn’t going to be collected, you would know why.

So, yeah, that’s basically summarises our our campaign.

Residents also received terms and conditions and a welcome pack when they subscribed, when they got their sticker as well.

In terms of our results of our scheme.

So we’ve had over 32,000 subscriptions and that’s about 59% of our households, but about 65% when you exclude properties that obviously weren’t so suitable for a garden waste collection.

In terms of our actual subscriptions, over 90% were online with smaller number like like you can see underneath which were telephone subscriptions held, dealt with by our contact centre and also some face to face ones as well.

We had a small number of formal complaints where people weren’t so happy about the garden waste scheme.

And I’ll go on to talking about our our sort of pricing structure in in a little while.

So some of the complaints were regarding how we priced up our our subscriptions.

But All in all, we had a very small number of complaints from residents.

Obviously on social media there was a lot of negative comments on essentially every post we put out.

But, you know, that’s kind of part and parcel of making a change to a service.

People don’t like it.

But, you know, there was also positive comments as well.

In terms of our, once we started the scheme, yeah, we had a small number of replacement permit requests where people had either lost their sticker, stuck it on the wrong bin, or sometimes it was because their bin was replaced because it was damaged.

So that was quite small in the, in the bigger picture of how many thousands we’d actually handled.

In terms of the income raised, yeah, we’ve raised well, 653,000 lbs.

We were aiming for about 440 K.

That was the figure that the council would, would have liked.

So we, we surpassed that and we’d we feel like it’s, it’s gone very well In terms of the operational side.

We have been able to reduce the number of vehicles out collecting.

It’s still obviously a very fresh scheme just running for a matter of months.

But hopefully efficiencies will come and we’ll be able to analyse the data a bit bit more as we go further on in the year.

So actually I, I didn’t put anything in about our charging, but I will just quickly talk about that for our sort of top tips and lessons learned.

Obviously, we’re quite a new scheme compared to some other authorities that have had more established schemes.

So these are initial kind of tips from starting out quite recently.

One, my first it would be having a simple charging structure.

I know a lot of councils just have a single rate and it is that rate whether you how you subscribe, whenever you subscribe.

Before I started it had already been agreed in the council and actually when I came to this presentation last year and I did take away one of the tips which was, you know, if you’re going to make a change it’s not going to be liked, just go in with a rate, you know, a price.

So you don’t have to hit them twice with bad views, but we’re going to be hitting them probably twice with bad views when we come to renew for our next year.

So it was decided that we were going to charge an early bird rate of £20 a bin.

We had a higher rate if you phoned in that was 32 and then a higher rate again 37 lbs for the year if you actually had a face to face contact with the council.

We were criticised in terms of the 20 lbs online, you know, we weren’t obviously helping people that didn’t have access to the Internet or weren’t so savvy, but we did actually provide sort of face to face sessions with people to help them to try to counter some of that that negativity regarding that.

My other top tip here would be obviously you need to link to your collection software.

You know, with so many such a high number of subscriptions, you need that to kind of automate through so that you don’t have any manual processes so that the in cab technology, if you’ve got that in place, you know, they all know which house is registered for the collections.

The the equality impact assessment though was was really helpful when we were countering some of that comeback about the the rate and also about the scheme.

Basically how are we going to, you know, help people to have a garden waste collection?

Had we thought about all of the people that you know, it would impact?

So that was a really useful document to have and we have referred to that when dealing with complaints or or questions regarding the scheme.

In terms of our frequently asked questions, we’d done a selection of them before the scheme launched.

But I think in hindsight we probably could have spent a bit more time developing those so that we had a full set of them ready to go.

We kind of built on them as we as we were sort of like working through issues.

Our comms team, they relied on the frequently asked questions a lot.

They referred back to them and pointed people to them.

So if want it would be make sure that you’ve got that in place in terms of agreeing and approach for schools and churches.

Again, we were slightly on the back foot with that.

I think it was so busy we couldn’t really think of everything in advance.

And I think it would be good to know.

Are you going to be offering the scheme to those and how would they be able to sign up?

We we to do an online subscription.

You had to have a my era wash account in and so obviously schools and churches didn’t necessarily have that.

So we had to think of a different way they could actually sign up and then get get put on the system.

Obviously procuring a permit provider.

That has been a real godsend to us.

I don’t think as a very small team of about three people in the waste team, we had allowed for extra staff in the contact centre which we didn’t then actually use.

So without that help I think we would probably have struggled.

It would have been a very big ask on us and with all the all the other projects we’d got on the go, it would have been very difficult.

So having that reassurance that the permits would go out, that we had a system in place that would show which, which households had registered any replacement requests was, was really helpful and, and is still helpful today.

Obviously ensuring the crews are aware of the rules is pretty basic, isn’t it?

But you know, they need to know whether they’re going to collect it.

If there’s, is there a sticker?

Isn’t there a sticker?

We had a few initially whereby the permits weren’t delivered, whether they just got lost in the post, we don’t really know.

It was a very small number about 300 or so, but the crews were like well, should we shouldn’t we collect from the property.

So just being clear on that I think is really helpful.

Obviously offering a range of ways to sign up is key to give people that option to to sign up how however they’re comfortable.

Again, I’ve said here, replacement permits, being able to issue those, have a record of those is really helpful to know if anybody is really, you know, requesting too many.

And then I just put at the bottom just having that extra support to deal with, with any extra enquiries that come through in my team.

Essentially, we were very small when it launched.

Somebody was on leave, which in hindsight was a, a decision that wasn’t a really good decision at the time.

So there was still some admin that we had to deal with, but but we managed to get through it.

Another tip I had was our residents, they, they did have a tendency to put the wrong house number on the online form, even though we were like saying, you know, put your address in correctly.

They tended to just put a neighbouring number, which wasn’t helpful because we wouldn’t know.

And the permit would go out to that neighbour or that other number, house number.

And then they would wonder, you know, why hadn’t they had their permit?

And we would look on the system and then obviously it was obvious that they’d put the wrong house number in.

So I think next year we’ll be, we’ll be you know, banging on about that to try to get people to sign up correctly.

And then in terms just our next steps, really I guess everybody who’s launching a scheme has to then think about what’s coming next.

We’ve got to think how we’re going to handle the renewal process.

Are we going to be taking the garden waste subscription offline at a certain point in time?

Obviously we need to agree our fees and charges at Airwash.

They tend to agree them in March, which obviously we need to have the subscriptions open by them because we we’re running from a 1st of April scheme through.

So we’ve got to come up with a different system for that.

And we need to work out how we’re going to communicate with our residents, the ones that are are already subscribed.

We have gathered like e-mail addresses etcetera to be able to mail shopped, but we’ve got to work out how we can do that.

And then we’re also looking at direct debits, potentially introducing direct debits, but we know that that is quite a a kind of whole project in itself essentially.

So yeah, that’s just a question mark at the moment.

I think that’s it from me.

Thank you.