Transcript
Good morning.

So I am from Basildon Council and I have worked for two different councils in South Essex.

Most of you probably have heard of Basildon but I’m not going to talk about the history of Basildon.

I’m going to talk to you about what I’ve learnt about garden waste over the last couple of years, what probably is a really good idea and what isn’t a bad idea.

I’m not going to go into the history of Basildon because otherwise I’m going to have to look at talk about Depeche Modem, Alison Moyet and stuff like that.

So we won’t do that.

As already mentioned, Basildon did win the award for best garden waste collection last year.

I think we were the only people that entered.

That’s why we won.

But let’s, let’s let’s gloss over that quickly.

So I’m just going to go through a few different bits.

And these are the sort of five things I think you need to probably think about with your garden waste collections, charging and getting the payments right, terms and conditions, helping your cruise, which as an OPS manager is I personally think the most important thing because if you don’t get your cruise doing the right thing, they’ll miss bins that **** it and they’ll you’ll have problems basically advertising and re subscriptions.

So getting how much you’re going to charge right is probably the number one thing.

Basically number one, are you going to charge weekly or oh sorry, you’re going to collect weekly or fortnightly?

I’ve run both.

Basildon does run a weekly collection.

Castle Point I used to work for ran a fortnightly collection.

There’s pros and cons for both and it’s purely down to the fact that Basildon before it went chargeable, was running a weekly collection and councillors didn’t want to reduce services and increase charges so that’s the way they went.

Also you need to think about whether you’re running April to March or if you’re rolling running rolling collections basically.

Personally, I think I would always go for April to March collection resubscription years.

That is mainly to do with cruise and making their life easier, but we’ll come on to that in a bit.

So basically there is getting the resubscription or the sort of the subscription charge right is imperative to getting getting the service.

If you charge too much, your subscriptions will be lower.

I know a council that had collections had a subscription rate at around £40.

The councillors got really greedy and reduced it, sorry, increased it to 96 quid.

Their subscriptions went through the floor and actually they’re earning less money than they did when they were earning 50 charging £50.

So don’t get too greedy with your subscription rate because otherwise you might actually have lower subscriptions than you would in the 1st place.

And also if you don’t charge enough there’s absolutely no point you doing it charging £5 for a bin, you’re not going to cover your charges or anything like that.

Also, are you going to charge for second or third bins?

And are you going to have a discount for those for those bins?

So Basan Council has people can have literally as many bins as they want and we will pay, we will charge them.

I’ve got some some people in parts of my borough that have I think the top one’s got 13 bins, but that’s because he’s got his own football pitch in his back garden.

So he needs to cut now on a weekly basis, collect all the grass and whatever.

But that’s basically it’s money coming in.

That crew that does that area, which is a load of massive houses, has very few houses to actually do.

They’ve got around that’s about half the size of everybody else purely because they will be collecting twice as many bins at all those properties.

But we’re making money out of those people.

There’s less diesel and stuff being used because it goes goes to one house to empty 10 bins and get on with it.

Some people have do charge for bin deliveries.

I’ve not really, I think it’s personally too much admin, but there we go.

So I’ve always try to make sure that we do every as much as possible online, so much so that we actually restrict the number.

Of course, we don’t get extra call centred people in if they have to wait on the on a phone longer to actually get their phone answered, that actually might push people to the website.

And we know that it pushes people to the website.

We get a lot of complaints about people having to wait online, but there are people that will go, oh, actually I’ll try the try it online.

We also had a lot of, so all of our libraries in Essex do support sort of IT training and we linked up with them.

I had one old man who had never used any online technology before in of his life.

We got him trained.

He is now well adversed in the world of Amazon.

He’s all of his daughters don’t really like the fact that he keeps buying stuff that he doesn’t need on Amazon, but at least he is now trained on online stuff and he has resubscribed without any help at all so people can do it.

And we’ve had over 95% of people doing online stuff.

We still get a lot of phone calls, but we just make them wait and go with a phone message just to use the website as much as possible.

Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere near direct debit.

The barge pole.

I think it’s too much effort.

I think there’s too many downfalls of people moving, people changing the bank account, people just deleting their direct debit because they don’t know what it is.

Because it’s A1 service that comes out once a year.

It’s not your council tax that comes out monthly.

It’s not Netflix, but everybody understands it’s and in reality probably on their bank account it will say something really stupid.

It won’t say garden waste cancel subscription basil, and it’ll say some stupid letters that council tax decide that they want to put in there.

So they’ll have no idea what it is and they’ll just cancel it.

So I know a number of councils that have tied direct debit and moved away from it.

Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere yet.

I would make sure that you do have a process for your 14 day refunds.

That is person a law that you have to do by through sort of commercial law.

So you will have to do that.

The next thing that I would make sure it’s you get right is your terms and conditions.

Make sure upfront you have some really, really tight, strong terms and conditions that all of your counsellors and everybody has signed up to.

Make sure you get it right and justify why you’ve done it, why you’ve made certain decisions.

And make sure they’re in your terms and conditions because then you can use them to answer any complaints that they that are out there.

And if you decide I’m going to do XYZ, put it in the terms and conditions.

If it’s in the terms and conditions make and they’ve all signed for it, you can go what was in terms and conditions, you sign for it.

And I, we use those like numbered terms and condition numbers in our complaints on a regular basis to answer complaints and it just shuts them down straight away.

You signed up for it, bad luck basically.

And if the councillors are on board and they’ve agreed to it, they’ve got nowhere to go.

So there’s a few things that I would make sure in terms and conditions, who owns the bin specifically if you are moving from a non chargeable service to a chargeable service, make sure that you have it in your terms and conditions that the council owns the bin.

So if they decide not to subscribe that basically they will, you can go, I’ll have that bin back and I’ll give it to somebody else who does want it.

Or if they don’t resubscribe at some point, you can basically nick their bin back or whatever.

It’s all your bins.

And if they dump it and it’s got their number on it, you can then charge them.

So there’s always that.

In terms of MIS collections, I wouldn’t ever give a refund on MIS collections.

We don’t do it.

It’s in our terms and conditions.

It’s quite strong.

That says we don’t give any refunds on missed collections, including bad weather, strikes, acts of God and all sorts of other random things that might happen.

But you do need to make sure you do actually click your missed collections.

We have had to give one person that we offered an incredibly bad service for some.

The ombudsman did actually make us give somebody some money back for that because because we didn’t offer the service.

So although it that does help us, it also might hinder you a little bit.

We do run a half price mid year sale on the 1st of October and there’s a number of people that actually only ever want bins for their for lethal.

They don’t really have a garden, they’ve got a big concrete patch, but they have a big oak tree so they want leaves.

We’ve offered always offer that so they don’t can’t have a subscription through the first six months of the year and they don’t really want it, but they can have it in the second part of the year.

And also we’ve also used this as quite a good way of getting people to subscribe.

So if they certainly, if they’ve moved into the borough, they might just go well, I I’ll pay for half the year and then actually, oh, this is a great service.

Hopefully if I’m doing my job properly anyway, then they’ll and then they’ll hopefully resubscribe the next year.

And we know that a lot of people do resubscribe but have once taken it up for mid year.

The other thing is winter breaks.

We last introduced a winter break last year basically to help.

There’s very little waste over Christmas and January.

So we pull all those crews off and they go and help with Christmas catch up basically.

And also I had two weeks where I had so many crews I could actually do some training.

It’s the only time I’ve ever been out to get some crew crew training done.

I’ve actually managed to get crew training and because it’s in there and it says we will run a six, six week winter break, nobody can argue about and didn’t know.

We always get a load of people going.

I didn’t know about it and we were just in terms and conditions.

The only issue is obviously because lethal is so late generally nowadays and so intermittent on when it’s going to fall.

We will get complaints around it.

But we have to put in the date for the six week break early and we can’t predict you’re crude that.

So as I said, as OPS manager, personally, I think one of the most important things you need to do is make sure that you help your cruise out.

I my IT guys and stuff won’t thank me for this because I make them do stuff that is painful.

But if it makes my cruise life easier and if the waste gets collected and stuff like that, then actually we get less complaints because all they care about is their waste getting collected in the end.

So make their life as easy as possible.

And I’m not going to try and say under the salesman for Permiserve here other, no, there aren’t any others.

Just use Perma surf bucket.

So personally, we’ve looked at technology and whether we can just get the crews to look at by going, oh, there’s a bin there, there’s a bin there.

Personally, I think it’s much easier for the sake sake of about a pound or whatever it is nowadays, it’s much easier to have a permit on a bin.

You can, the crews can quickly see that they’ve got the right permit and the supervisors can just drive down a road and go, yeah, that bins that, that bins that.

If the bins been missed and it’s got the wrong permit, the supervisors straight away going, well, they did the right job, they’ve not collected it.

And they can also make sure that the crews that liked might want to go and help that little old lady who can’t be bothered to pay.

They can stop all of that basically in terms of going back to the April to March thing, it does help significantly if you’ve got permits because you can easily and you do it in April and March, you can easily just do a different colour permit each year.

The crews will know so straight away that they’ve resubscribed and and then it’s like, well, this year’s it’s the green permit.

It’s got goats in the background.

It must be the one that don’t.

I don’t it was comms decision to put goats on.

I don’t know.

So they know straight away that that it’s the correct permit for the year.

Then we can we can collect that bin.

If they’ve not got the right permit on, we don’t collect it.

No permit, no collection.

So there’s just a couple of bits on the permit that I would make sure that you will definitely need to have have a ID number.

IT will love you to have an ID number.

They love IT, they love IT.

People love our unique numbers means that if there’s any an issue, you could always go to exactly the correct report or subscription.

And if they’ve got multiple subscriptions, then they’ve got different numbers.

You can do that.

Or if they want a second bin halfway through the year or a third bin or whatever, you can link it straight to their correct subscription number and they’ve all got one account rather than 15 different accounts.

If make sure they’ve definitely got the address on it.

The address is really important.

The crews should be and if normally you would have it much larger on the bottom.

If the basically the crews need to make sure that they have a quick check of that address to make sure it’s roughly outside the route house.

If it’s outside some, if they’re in Church Road and the permit says London Road, they shouldn’t be collecting that bin because probably somebody’s gone and nicked it from somewhere or they haven’t bothered changing their account or anything like that.

Need to make sure that that is all correct and they can they can do that easily.

That’s not so easy with just some technology.

Replacements permits do do specifically hashed permits, replacements.

I would definitely suggest this.

We have a number of people that try and photocopy permits, try and do all sorts of random things.

Some of them are quite, quite, yeah, quite impressive.

And some of them are really bad.

The really bad ones are funny.

The, the really good ones are quite.

It’s like, God, you’ve spent £400 trying to make a £20 permit.

Hold on.

But yeah, so make sure that that you can do that.

Also.

You need to know where once you’ve got all your subscriptions, you need to know where they are because they will, especially if you’re just introducing a service, it will change throughout the year and what you’ve got in April might be completely different from what you’ve got in like August.

So you need to do that and you need to be flexible over where your rounds are.

Also, the number of rounds you’re only going to need in April because of the amount of waste you’re going to be producing probably need to be completely different from the ones that you need need in November or probably more likely February, because you’re not going to be producing much waste in February.

So you need to be flexible and you need to have a way of optimising, optimising that.

In Basildon we run 10 rounds on a Monday because that’s where all the footballers live, and five on a Friday because that’s where, yeah anyway, people that don’t have gardens live.

So we have to actually have a very flexible workforce to be able to do that.

And we’ve had to change all the different other parts of our collections around.

So for example, we run trade glass and stuff on a Friday by using and use the garden waste crews that we would be collecting otherwise on a Monday to do that.

And we’ve had to be flexible because we don’t want to change.

We want to make sure that their collection day is on the same day as as they’re normal rubbish.

We’ve even bought small, small little vehicles to help us out in crew in estates where to make sure that we can offer 100% of our customers the service if they want it.

So this vehicle does collect refuse and garden waste and all sorts of different things, but we, we are able to offer it to 100% of people if they want it.

Basically contaminated bins.

Do make sure that you contact people if they’ve got a contaminated bin and make sure that you do bin hangers and stuff.

Premise of do make bin hangers.

I don’t need to, I must be on Commission yet.

No.

So one of the other things I think is incredibly important is advertising.

This year in Basildon we didn’t do enough advertising.

We didn’t do enough enough telling people to resubscribe and our figures were down down because of it, because it all link, because it all happened around the time of our all out collect elections.

So they, none of the people didn’t really want us to go big on advertising, but it really did affect our figures and I think if we’d pushed it harder, we would have got much higher resubscription rates.

I can’t under, under state how much, how important it is to make sure you get your, you get as much advertising out there as possible.

The more advertising you do, the more subscriptions you get done and the more subscriptions you do, the more money you get in.

In reality, you are the only reason you’re doing this is to bring money into the council.

If you’re not going to do it properly, there’s absolutely no point doing it.

And when you’re advertising it, make it sound cheap because in reality £50 a year is still less than if you’re doing a weekly collection.

Still less than a quid a quid a collection.

I have no idea how much your first half slamp is anymore, so that’s an old one.

I probably about £16 or something like that now, but make sure you link it to something that is cheap.

Most people will be able to buy a coffee more expensive than a food waste, garden waste collection and you can’t, you can’t do that.

So make sure that that sounds as good value as possible.

Do tell people what you can, what they can and can’t recycle.

It’s really important and include lots of stuff.

And when it gets to certain times of the year, do tell them that things like windfall fruit can go in your garden waste collection.

Because that might be the people that want to take it up at 16 LB or whatever it is at the half price level when because they’ve got an allotment and they produce a lot of trees, but they never add in grass.

And there’s so you and I actually get people to take it on later in the year.

But also make sure you don’t tell people.

Tell people what not, what not, what not to collect.

So resubscriptions make sure you do it as early as possible.

We normally start our resubscriptions for April in at the end of January, basically straight after, straight after the Christmas catch up is done.

We go early and you’d be surprised how many people do start subscribing the second you send out that e-mail to tell people to resubscribe.

Our resubscription emails basically have a link on it.

They press a button, go straight through our system.

All they’ve got to do is put in their new credit card details, press another button, job done.

And then everything else is automated because we have technology that basically sends it straight off to Permasurf.

Permasurf do the rest and that’s all done.

So in in a number of number of computer clicks they’ve managed to resubscribe and you’ll be surprised that we probably had about 3000 do it in January and that obviously is bringing money in as soon as possible.

But make sure if you do, when you do get resubscriptions, advertise and bin hanger and cruise that don’t cruise had that bins that haven’t got a new subscription on them, just stick them a bin hanger and tell them how to resubscribe.

And they can always go back to their to their subscription number and use that to do that.

So just to go back.

So make sure you get your charges and payments right.

Definitely have some terms and additions and make them as strong as you possibly can.

Always help your crews because if the crews can’t do it, then you’re going to get complaints.

Your rest of your service might be absolutely amazing, but if your crews are rubbish, then everything’s going to go wrong.

Make sure you advertise because if you don’t tell people about it, nobody’s going to know.

And make sure resubscriptions are as easy as possible.

And that’s that.

And if you have any questions, e-mail me.

That’s about it.

Thanks a lot.