Claims that missed bin collections in Birmingham are at their lowest rate in two years have been greeted with scepticism from councillors.
Over the next few weeks the city council will switch the way its collections are organised, moving from a four-day to a five-day working and redesigning rounds.
It comes on the back of a torrid 2017 for the authority, where the three-month strike over pay grades - costing £6.6m - were swiftly followed by a backlog of missed collections in December caused by heavy snow .
An update on the waste collection service was provided to the council’s housing homes and scrutiny committee in a meeting which turned into a baptism of fire for Mike Heath, the new assistant director of waste management. Although it was Jacqui Kennedy, the council’s corporate director of Place, who fielded most of the questions.
She said: “Missed collections have reduced again.
“Missed collections are actually lower than they were pre-strike and are at some of the lowest levels for many years.
“We get our data sets and we review them, we monitor missed collections in terms of individual properties and missed whole streets.
“We started to find a number of roads are consistently being missed. What is very apparent is that roads at the end of the round are often missed.
“We have a new operating model starting in April and May. We are redesigning the rounds so that people don’t end up being persistently missed at the end of the round.”
But committee chair Cllr Victoria Quinn (Lab, Sparkbrook) challenged the claim and questioned why the detailed figures were not ‘accessible’.
She said: “I’m really interested that you say you are at your lowest levels, is that pre-strike? In my personal experience in some wards, Bordesley Green, Washwood Heath, Sparkbrook, they have not stabilised. They are peaking and spiking.”
Cllr Quinn later added: “The big headline in the city is that Birmingham is committed to weekly bin collections for the next four years.
“If anyone in this city has experienced their bins not been collected every week what faith can they have that they will be collected every week?”
Cllr Penny Holbrook (Lab, Stockland Green) stated she was ‘very nervous’ about the redesign of collection rounds saying it felt like ‘the end of the world’ the last time they were changed claiming one road had four different collection days.
She also expressed reservations about a proposed move to identify which crews were missing the most collections warning that the council had previously suffered from a ‘historical culture of blame’ within the service.
In response, Ms Kennedy said the missed collection figures would be made publicly available and a new waste collection officer role was to be created to engage with residents and photograph evidence of missed collections.
“It is very much about using our data to drive up performance and that the teams understand the consequences of not collecting waste,” she added.
