Better Waste Services
PermiServ
1 August 2024
Better Waste Services Live: Garden Waste 2024 – Q&A Session 1
We do have one already and I believe it might be for Darren and Jeff, but anyone can comment.
It’s did you, did you consider staggering renewal reminders to reduce incoming?
No, as a, as a short answer for that.
And in fact, we’ve moved away from a 1st of April renewal date to 1st of June, but it is just one renewal date now rather than a staggered perfect.
Is there any questions from the floor at all?
Yeah, I’ve got one.
It’s a bit easier to just say I, I, I can’t even.
Yeah, yeah.
So I’m Scott and I’m from solid.
We started, we started our free service of 2012 and then we started charging in 2019.
So we’ve gone through the journey of starting at 30 lbs, we’re now charging for 80 lbs for a weekly service.
So something for anyone that doesn’t know, that’s a inner London far off.
My, my question to the panel is, if I was to say to you, what is your breaking point?
Breaking point meaning what value would you put on so like that, what financial value would you put as your price before you start to do subscriptions significantly.
So we’ve gone so we’re at 80, we moved from 60 from last year and we lost 2 1/2 thousand subscriptions.
So our breaking point was clearly somewhere between 60 and 80.
So I’d just be interested to know, although majority of the kind of just started, if you it was vastly clear, would you who would like to go first for some next?
Yeah, so our starting price is quite low at 24 lbs and today we’re at 42 lbs / 8 years.
So those increases have been small year on year deliberately for that reason and we’ve retained our percentage constantly at around 76 to 78%.
So I wouldn’t know exactly what the the breaking point was.
But really the advice I think is just to keep to to small increases and proportionate to what your borough’s council tax is set up.
As I think I said in presentation, we’re really low council tax band.
So that has to be commensurate in the price as well.
Thank you.
As we did an average across the Staffordshire district and came out quite low.
I don’t I wouldn’t want to go any lower than what we are currently at 3850.
I do think the scope for an increase but but again look at looking across the district, I think the highest was 52.
Disappointingly when some have reset this year, I think we’ve actually come out as the lowest or the second lowest.
So we, we probably could have afforded to go slightly higher, but I certainly wouldn’t want to go any lower than the 3850 currently.
Yeah, obviously in, in arrow wash.
I can only apologise.
I missed a slide out.
So if you wanted to know about the scheme and our scheme in a little bit more detail, please look at the slides.
Obviously we’ve started out really low with this early bird rate of 20 lbs.
I think we felt that it did obviously engage with people and we were hoping obviously that people will keep signing up as we go forward, but we will be increasing the price I’m sure.
But I, I don’t really know about the break, break even kind of yeah, prices.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Any other questions from the floor?
I do have a couple coming through on Slido.
So the first one is I guess so the whole panel.
Do you offer refunds for significant service disruption EG weather, strike, COVID that lovely.
The terms and conditions say no.
The reality is when COVID struck, we give the residents the time back.
So that is why we are now on a June renewal date.
So we worked out, we lost probably a couple of months or four collections over the course of the year, not for all areas of the borough, but we gave that back across the board for consistency and ease.
So we gave them back in terms of pushing their renewal date back further, which had some questions about, well, we’re not having monetary back until we come out of the service.
Well, that’s right.
You get that money back when you finish with the service, but you get an extra two months on your service.
In our TS and CS, it’s just the statutory term that you’ve had the right to cancel.
And if there’s any significant breakdown in the service, for example, if we were to miss, I think it’s three consecutive collections, then you’re entitled to a refund.
But other than that, no.
Yeah, in Arrow Wash, we’d been quite specific in the TS and CS.
So we are basically not giving refunds wherever possible.
Obviously we’re quite new, so we haven’t had any sort of bad weather disruptions, etcetera to face.
But we are only offering 20 collections with a winter break.
So we might not have any issues with like, you know, waste getting stuck in the bin, but I think we’ve tried to cover ourselves off as much as possible so we don’t have to.
Yeah, give refunds.
Just a quick one for you, Craig.
Someone asked, did you increase the amount of call centre staff you had to cope with subscriptions?
We offered the call centre a percentage of the income so they were able to recruit to the to the, to the, to the contact centre.
They did increase, but it wasn’t how I would have liked it to be done, to be frank.
I think for anybody who who looks to do something like that, I think you need to be heavily involved to make sure that the the funds are spent appropriately.
It still ended with a lot of additional work being being put onto our team.
We have a small back office team and we have, we don’t just manage waste.
We have seven different work streams so so that it’s always busy.
So yeah, whilst the funding was there, it was available.
I don’t think it was used properly.
Lots of questions coming through now.
So there’s lots of talk around average prices and comparisons with neighbours charge charging rates.
How have you balanced this against the actual cost of service?
Darren, thank you.
I suppose back to the beginning, the initial target was to hit the loss in recycling credits which was a 350K.
So we we did that and that quite easily.
And then year on year since that, we have not yet until probably this year got to the stage where we’re covering service costs, which as you can imagine is quite a often FOI inquiry we get.
So we are only just breaking even now eight years in with our pricing and covering service costs.
From our perspective at Cannock, the intention was to cover as much of the service cost as we possibly could.
We knew it wouldn’t cover the whole cost.
We expected to bring in an income of around about 600,000 in the first year.
Again, as I’ve mentioned earlier, we’ve, we’ve exceeded that.
So hopefully we might be some way to covering the full service cost.
But other than that it was just a, you know, we, we wanted an income stream, but it was all, all about looking at cost savings in narrow wash.
I think the main focus was just getting engagement from residents.
So they, they, you know, wanted a lower price to begin with.
And obviously we have met our sort of income or exceeded it, should I say so?
Yeah, That was the main sort of focal point for Erowash.
And there’s a question with two upvotes.
Do you charge, do any of the panel charge for reprints of lost permits?
No, that’s a collective no, just looking because lots of things.
Someone asked what did your crew training and engagement look like?
Wasn’t wasn’t that much change in the operational service to be honest, other than the charge coming in.
So there was no real need to do any additional OPS training and nor did we.
Yeah, I, I would say the same.
I don’t think we’ve seen too much difference in terms of the, you know, obviously a slight reduction in the collections, but the crews are already out there anyway doing the same collections every fortnight.
There’s just no slightly less number little bit of technology for the drivers more more than anybody else to learn, but nothing more than that really.
Yeah, really the same in Airwash.
They were just still learning the white space sort of incap technology.
It was just sort of pot parcel of of that really.
I think this is a question following on from that reprint one, but testing my garden waste knowledge is that oh just lost it.
I think someone from Airwash have around 10% of replacement permit requests.
We receive numerous requests.
How do you manage this to reduce it and keep it low?
Replacement permits?
It says 10% replacement permit requests.
If the person could edit that question.
Oh, you got it.
No, they were actually, yeah, the subscription, it was about 300 or something.
So how do you keep it so low for a case that we get more?
I think obviously we were quite new into the scheme, so the replacement requests we’d had were just literally what people had contacted us about.
So they were like they hadn’t received them or they’d stuck them on the wrong part of the bin or the wrong bin or lost them.
So, yeah, I don’t know why it is low.
It’s just kind of like the number that we’ve experienced.
Yeah.
Whether people just, yeah, I don’t know, maybe, yeah.
I mean, we did have a few where it was just down to, you know, the wrong house name on our sort of gazetteer information that, you know, things like that.
Yeah.
We just literally because it was new, we accommodated those for people.
We wanted people to be kept on board and if they were irritated by having the wrong house number on, like I think one said Chatsworth House on it and it it should have been something slightly different and she didn’t want the crew laughing about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Any other questions from hands up or should I carry on?
I think everyone’s keen on slide.
Oh, OK.
So someone said we found, surprisingly, that husbands and wives didn’t talk and sometimes both subscribed unknowingly.
Have you found a way in your systems for stopping this?
Yeah, our system we’ve now got that we’ve developed actually stops a second one from coming through.
So we do find we have a similar problem with people that move out and don’t cancel the service and then somebody else moves in.
So it just makes us aware.
It flags up that that property already has a subscription.
It asks them the reason why they want another subscription.
So it could be that they want to add a bin.
It could be that they’re a new resident, or it could be that the husband’s already done it and have not spoken to each other.
So it just gives them that.
That get out clause there.
They can either carry on or cancel, but it’s the system that tells them in Erewash, our system did actually prevent.
The online system did prevent duplicate addresses being put in.
So This is why we found out where people put the wrong house number in because the the right person had come to register or subscribe and basically it was like you can’t and then they would contact us to find out why our system did limit.
We did allow additional requests for extra permits after the event.
So that was a slight problem with our system because obviously it would say you’ve got one, you can’t have any more.
So we had to kind of do a work around for that, a different kind of form point people in a different way to request additional bins after the initial subscription.
But yeah, kind of on that sign up topic, someone asked what are residents charged if they sign up halfway through the year?
Are part year discounts offered?
If not, have you had much pushback from residents at all?
Sorry, sorry, not from not from Hinckley.
We, we stalk as I said in the presentation, I think to to one price and keep it low because the systems couldn’t work with more than a few variables.
So ours is quite simple, one price for the year regardless of when you join and one renewal.
Yeah, it’s the same at Cannock.
It’s one price for the entire year.
However many number of collections are still available.
We do advise them, I think it’s from August.
We’re we’re entertained that from August we will advise when you’re only going to get a small number.
We do have people who ask if they can pay half and just receive half, but no, it’s one price for all.
Yeah, exactly the same in Airwash, yeah.
Have any councils had any equality issues with pricing for smaller and larger sized bins or did you standardise the sizing?
Standardise across the panel.
Perfect.
Sorry, there’s lots of questions.
So do you charge for bins separately or is it included in the service cost?
The actual garden waste bin, I’m assuming?
Yeah, not included in the price, just a a separate charge that we deal with as capital every year, just the same as the other waste dreams as well.
So no distinction.
At Carnock we don’t charge for the bin.
It’s just something that’s always been in place.
I believe at Stafford we do, Becky, is that right?
Yeah, so at Stafford we do, at Carnock we don’t.
So that’s probably something I’m going to have to harmonise in the near future.
Obviously in Arrow Wash, we just moved from the free service, so most households had a a bin, but we do charge for extra ones or yeah, replacements if they’re stolen, for example.
Fantastic.
That brings us to the end of our first session.
There’s loads of questions still coming on and slide.
It’s a big round of applause for our panel this morning.
Thanks guys.