Dear Neighbour,
Many of you have been in touch to share your concerns about the decline in the quality of refuse collection in recent months, following the introduction of the new service a few months ago.
The new service has been introduced to bring food waste collection to Wandsworth, which is a legal requirement on all councils in England under the Environment Act passed by the previous Government.
Introducing the new service was always going to present understandable teething problems, and the previous Council Administration ran a pilot food waste collection trial in Southfields to identify some of the issues that might arise.
However, more than four months into the new service, we have become increasingly concerned by the ongoing issues.
We’ve had reports of repeatedly missed collections. These have caused frustration and inconvenience, and left food waste rotting in the streets. They have even led to some residents being wrongly fined by the Council for flytipping, when in fact the alleged “fly tip” was a missed collection of bins bags (left out at the correct time by residents) which the Council’s enforcement officers later mistook for flytipping. This is a mixed picture - some streets seem to be unaffected whilst other streets have not had their food waste caddies collected for up to 6 weeks.
The new service also uses three separate vehicles to collect general waste, general recycling and food waste separately, whereas the previous service used a single vehicle with separate compartments to collect and separate all waste together. This means a more complicated system that is contributing to the poor quality of service we have seen, alongside increasing congestion and particulate emissions on residential streets.
We have presented lots of evidence of these issues to the Labour-run Council, but so far they are not taking our concerns seriously – the lead councillor for waste collection even said at a Council meeting earlier this year that “we’re not smelling a big problem here.”
So we’re asking neighbours to help us make our case to the Council by sharing your experiences of the new waste contract. please do so by filling out our survey, Please do provide your details on the next page as well, so we know where the problem areas are.
Very best wishes,
Battersea Conservatives