Large families who struggle with the move to three-weekly black bin collections in South Gloucestershire can apply for a second wheelie bin, council leaders have announced.
It comes as civic chiefs admitted making mistakes during the transition to a new waste service for the first time in 25 years.
The reduction from fortnightly black bin days is being accompanied by the rollout of new reusable white recycling bags for plastic, cans and foil, and a roll of small blue bags for soft plastic for the first time following a successful trial, along with a nappy and hygiene waste collection.
Council leaders were grilled by cross-party councillors at South Gloucestershire Council scrutiny commission about how the first seven months of the new contract had gone.
Opposition Cllr Paul Hughes asked: “With the change to three-weekly bin collections, have you modelled the impact on vulnerable residents and larger households, and if you have, what is the outcome of that?”
Cabinet member for communities and local place, Cllr Sean Rhodes, replied: “Any household that is struggling to manage with the move to three-weekly, even once they’ve taken on the recycling, there is the capacity for applying for an additional black bin.
“They will be assessed on that, and as long as all of the appropriate levels of recycling and sorting are happening, the option of getting an additional black bin is available to people, as long as they apply through the website.”
As part of the £120 million eight-year contract, the council has taken over operating the waste transfer stations and household waste recycling centres, while kerbside collections continue to be outsourced to Suez, which held the previous long-term private finance initiative (FFI) deal.
It meant the TUPE transfer of more than 50 staff into the local authority and replacing over half the bin lorries in year one.
Cllr Rhodes told the meeting: “I genuinely cannot overstate the amount of work that has gone into delivering transformational change to a service which connects to almost every single one of our residents. To deliver this amount of change in such a short space of time is quite frankly remarkable and we should all be very grateful to our officers.”
But a report to the commission said not everyone was aware their bin day had changed following the move over last August, despite the authority sending two separate leaflets to every household, as well as social media posts, adverts, and information in One Stop Shops and libraries.
Cllr Hughes asked: “Do you think you could have done more on this to obtain a better result?”
Cllr Rhodes said: “The ideal way of doing it would be 1-2-1 to every household and knock on every single door to let people know but obviously that’s not going to happen. The simple answer to your question is yes, there are always lessons we can learn to get our comms better.
“We want to do more. Anyone who doesn’t get the information we put out is to some extent a failing but we acknowledge that and there are lessons we have learned in terms of how we make contact with people. Overall a good job was done in terms of getting that information out. A considerable change happened.
“Could we have done more? Always, we could do more, absolutely.”
By Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporter