Transcript

We have some questions coming in on slide.

Oh, but I’d offer it out to the floor first.

Anyone would like to raise their hand and ask a question to the panel after the two great presentations I’ve just seen?

No, OK, everyone a bit shy waiting for the line.

So first of all, I think this might be to you, Tim or both open.

Do Christmas trees get collected as part of the service?

How does this work with the winter break at the moment?

I mean, it’s we’ll look at it because previously we, we stopped did November starts again in in March.

So we sort of missed that festive, but we’re only breaking for the the two weeks over Christmas start again like early January.

About the same time people do start removing the Christmas tree.

So it’s highly likely we will at that point include Christmas trees.

We run a special Christmas tree collection.

It’s completely free.

They don’t have to put it in the bin or anything.

It’s for the so basically we, so it’s basically straight after Christmas catch up, which is a week after Epiphany.

So they’re going to have to keep it for a week, but then it’s free.

But we don’t make them put it in a bin.

And there was a sort of hope that some people might get, oh, that’s a nice collection, we’ll subscribe.

We’re not convinced anybody did that, but so we have.

If a resident doesn’t want to pay for the garden waste collection, what do you advise?

Do an offer an ad hoc one off collection.

We we don’t offer an ad lock collection.

No, we just tell them to keep hold of the bean in case they change their mind.

We still have.

We also don’t offer any ad hoc collections.

We try and recover the bin as quickly as possible.

We have got our own recycling centres, we just generally send them there.

We have a question of how many properties on average do your green waste crews collect per day?

Do we know that statistic?

When we was, when we were free, it was round about 14115 hundred.

But bear in mind they they weren’t all putting out.

So I think now it’s dropped down to probably about just over 1012 hundred something like that.

So I think they cover 1200 properties, if not slightly more, but they won’t collect from 1200 properties in, in certain rounds, certain areas they might get close to that because our areas are.

So we’ve got some that we’ve got so like dense populations of like subscriptions of like up to 80%.

They might be collecting near on 1100 a day, whereas other ones they having to spend an awful long time driving between properties.

Perfect, thank you.

So we have one thing.

Did you have to change garden waste collection days to even out the numbers?

And did you notify customers?

We didn’t have to change days, but like I mentioned, we had the the eight, our 8 old rounds, 3 rounds and we just populated those as, as the new subscribers came in.

So they remained on the same collection day.

We’ve also not, we just made a decision that we wouldn’t change collection days because we didn’t want somebody’s refuse and recycling collection on a Tuesday and their garden waste collection on a Friday or something.

But we make, so we’ve got a number of drivers and stuff that are on three day weeks.

So things like that have always been introduced at the beginning of the week because that’s when our garden waste service is like the heaviest.

And it also frees us up for later in the week to run other sort of trade collections and other things like that.

Perfect.

Hopefully a quick fire one is what you can and cannot collect on your TS and CS.

It is, and it’s on the lid of the bin as well as is specifically not.

We’ve just put a link onto the website and it says refer to the website because if you need to change it, you can’t.

You don’t need to change your TS and CS.

You only change the website and if you change it, you need to change it four or five times a year because you’ve mucked it up.

Then the terms and conditions still apply.

Perfect, how do councils deal with bins presented with the previous year’s sticker on?

Luckily it’s our first year so I ain’t really got an answer for that one.

If it’s got the wrong permit on, you don’t collect it, you just put a bin hanger on it.

Mainly depends on what time of year it is.

Generally if it’s around re subscription.

For the first, we always give a a month.

So we always subscription year always ends on the 31st of March.

We always give until the end of April and we collect until the end of April to, for those few people that go, well, I’m not going to resubscribe until the 1st of April because I’m you’re not having my money early.

And then there’s obviously a bit of a lead time for the permit to turn up and stuff.

So we always give a month extra to go and collect those bins.

So some people get a free month, but hey, and then after that if they haven’t got the right permit, they don’t get a collection basically kind of on that timing.

1 Tim, if you’re launching a new charge for service, does it have to start on a Monday or as you just said, or can you set it the 1st of the month even if it lands on a Thursday?

Yeah, I don’t really understand the question.

Clarify that one out there.

But anyway, to Dudley, you operate Civica?

Yeah, Civica White Space and Permiserve simultaneously.

Have you had any issues in taking and matching payments?

Yeah, it was to do with a Civica outage in I think in our second week of going live, which again is is due to us not upgrading it.

And it we have a third party system that also back integrates into Civica, which is also being removed and updated.

Lessons learned.

I just hopefully at what hours do your frontline staff work either IE fixed hours or is it task and finish?

It’s fixed hours.

We bought the the green waste in line with the refuse so that it was 6:00 to 2:00 fixed hours just in case we can’t, you know, bake downs and it gives us a bit more longer to get some overtime in the afternoon.

We’re old school and run task and finish.

Still, our garden waste crews do run longer hours in the summer than they do in the winter, but we drop the number of crews down and as we route optimised multiple times during the year to make sure that they do a decent day’s work.

We’re going to mix 2 here, so one of them after interest.

After introducing the chargeable garden waste service, have you seen a rise in residual waste tonnage and on from that of what would you change if you had to do the whole process again from scratch?

The first one is the easier one.

Luckily in Dudley we’ve got any FW on site so we, we get all the tonnage data from that.

So we haven’t seen an increase really nothing, you know, tonnage is for green like I mentioned, 80%.

They haven’t, they haven’t really, really changed that much.

But we certainly haven’t seen an increase in residual.

And I think the lessons learnt explain what we’ve changed.

Again, we just have to give ourselves more time.

I everybody, whenever they introduce things like this, from fortnightly refuse collection, all sorts of stuff, they always go on about fly tipping increasing and lots of other stuff like that.

I’ve never heard of a council that’s ever had an increase of fly tipping.

People generally the fly tip couldn’t care less whether you’ve got a chargeable service or not.

They will fly tip.

If it’s free, they’ll fly tip.

If it’s chargeable, they’ll fly tip.

So don’t worry about that.

And what I’ve never seen an increase in.

So actually when I used to run at Castle Point Council, we were still on black sacks.

We just didn’t take black sacks full of garden waste and they were stickered and they were put back on their property and basically said we don’t collect it.

In terms of things I’d change, I’d completely agree is don’t underestimate how much time you need to set set stuff up because if you set stuff up too quickly you’re going to make mistakes.

We have a question at the top with two up votes and it’s for the autumn option.

How do you deal with lethal that is from council trees?

Do you allow a free permit?

What’s your stance on lethal and permits?

If it lands on your property, it’s your your problem.

You pick it up and you have to charge for it.

We don’t, we get a number of complaints every single year.

Basically it’s like, do you want that big nice oak tree outside your house?

If you’re doing it, something lands on your property, it’s your problem.

Basically, we’re not giving you anything free.

We’ll come and clear the path up outside your front because that’s our, our issue.

If it, if there’s waste on your land, we’re not going to pick out any waste up on your land, whatever, wherever it’s come from.

So it’s your problem, basically.

I know our collection is like all year and the same price.

And we, we did have the same a couple of complaints that the live opposite parks live opposite no feels, you know, can we get it free or reduced?

And again, it’s no, it’s on your property.

And then the question that follows is what do you do about communal properties, homes, community group permits?

Is there a difference for that?

We do say they can.

We don’t mind if residents share their bin if they, but they sort the money out themselves.

If they want to just divvy it up between them, they can.

We’ve had a couple of high rise flats where they’ve got like, you know, a few little pots and, and the shrubs and that on, on the, on the, on the in the garden and the, our housing team have paid for, for, for subscription for those, but that’s not many.

Yeah.

We also allow people to share bins and get multiple bins.

We also run 1100 garden waste bins, sort of a slightly discounted rate, which basically our trade waste team run.

It’s still at, they still don’t pay for disposal or anything.

And it’s not trade waste.

But in terms of churches, allotments and other people that might want to do produce more waste and there aren’t specifically normal domestic property, then we’ll we’ve got, so we’ve got a number of churches or schools, for example, that if they run their own grounds maintenance, they might want garden waste collected.

We just offer sort of an 1100 rate which is about I think it’s just slightly discounted of four times the price of a 240.

Perfect.

And we have one last question.

I know we’ve mentioned complaints a couple of times.

So regarding complaints, EG miss collection, if a resident demands compensation, how do you deal with this and what do you offer if you have a complaint and want like a screamer?

We sort of, we don’t offer refunds, we investigate it, but if there’s any doubt that our crew may have missed it and not recorded that sort of stuff, we’ll probably offer them another collection because we do a fortnightly collection.

We might be in like the the Stourbridge area on every Wednesday, but not the same streets.

So we women in the area, we’ll offer to pick it up for them.

But that’s again that’s very rare.

But sometimes, you know, we make mistakes.

Yeah, there’s only a couple of occasions where our service has been so appalling we’ve decided to give them a refund on the service.

And we did get one and that went to an ombudsman that we ended up having to give compensation to the crew.

Sorry, not the crew.

I would have loved it to the resident, but that one had a million different issues that wasn’t just purely related to MIS collections.

OK, thank you so much to our second session.

A round of applause from everyone.

Fantastic presentation there.