The great Arun bins fiasco

He has taken full responsibility and left the company, a meeting of Arun councillors has heard.

At a meeting of the district council's environment and community safety scrutiny committee on Thursday, Arun's head of environmental amenities, Kevin Basford, said the contract manager had "paid the price" and the council had yet to pay a full month's contract sum to Verdant.

Mr Winterbottom has now been replaced by another Verdant manager, Steve Bird.

Arun received an unprecedented number of phone calls in the weeks after the refuse collection change, more than 20,000 for the week starting March 7.

However, many of these calls were duplicated, meaning some people were calling up more than once to make the same complaint and if a call was not answered at the main switchboard and then re-routed to the dedicated call centre, it was tallied as two calls instead of one. So 20,000 calls doesn't necessarily mean 20,000 complaints.

Mr Basford said: "More than 98 per cent of the calls were dealt with and 57 per cent of those were about claimed missed collection."

Mr Basford said claims the council call centres were understaffed during March were a myth and that, in fact, 20 staff were on hand taking calls and 10 members of the corporate management team were dealing with callers wanting to speak with managers.

He went on to say that there were serious issues regarding assisted collections and the fact that some people were left off the schedule despite being registered with Arun.

He said it was unacceptable that some of Arun's most vulnerable people were left to deal with their own rubbish but pointed out that many people requested assisted collections very late, which did not help the registering process.

A review of everyone granted an assisted collection will take place in four to six months, as Verdant was inundated with requests for the service and did not have time to make the necessary checks to see if those people were eligible or not.

Mr Basford said the problem of people not understanding the collection changes or simply not complying with them was "bigger than we expected and bigger than others had experienced".

Mr Basford highlighted the fact that people need to leave their bins early on collection morning at the side of the main highway that the bin lorries can access and that this must apply to everybody, whether living in a flat or at the end of a private road.

He said: "We are not paying Verdant for a bespoke refuse service any more.

"Evidence from the last two weeks shows that many claimed missed collections, some individual properties and some whole streets, were, in fact, not ready by 7am.

"The crews are now logging these properties and whole streets and feeding the information back to us because they are not missed collections."

Verdant executive chairman John Miles said: "What people don't like is the council telling them to change their personal habits and that's what creates the problem because people don't agree with what the council is asking. But we're getting over that now and starting to reap the rewards of putting it in place."

Those rewards are greatly increased levels of reusable materials sent for recycling.

Around 56 tons of materials were collected from 6,000 houses in the first wave of fortnightly recycling collections in Findon, Ferring, East Preston and Rustington on Monday, April 11.

Although some of those houses had not had a recycling collection for three weeks, the amount is still a considerable diversion of material from landfill.

Perhaps the most encouraging statistic to come from the new recycling service is the participation rates which, so far, have averaged at 80 per cent, way above the Bertie Box participation of around 25 per cent and the nationally expected rate of 60 per cent.

In 2003, Arun residents produced more than 52,000 tons of waste and only about 13 per cent of this (6,777 tons) was recycled.

The government has recently revised recycling targets, with Arun needing to have recycled 30 per cent of its waste by 2005/6.

The increased recycling collections in the new refuse service should enable Arun to meet these guidelines.