Launched on 1st April, Cornwall Council’s new waste
collection and recycling service, run by private company Cory, has been slammed
by thousands of residents as a disaster.
Many hundreds of homes have yet to receive their new recycling
containers, there have been many thousands of missed collections, and heaps of
rubbish have piled up on the streets of our towns and villages. There have also
been numerous other problems, relating to green waste and dog mess.
There were always going to be some teething issues, but the
scale of the problems has proved to be truly immense. There have been so many
complaints that the Council’s call centre – even with extra staff – could not
cope.
Indeed, it has been confirmed that, in the first week of the
new arrangements, 50% of calls were not answered. Those people who did get
through were promised action within 48 hours, but time and time again, this did
not materialise.
It is to be welcomed that both Cornwall Council and Cory
have issued a full apology to local residents, and agreed that there should be a
full inquiry into what happened.
Like other Cornwall Councillors, I have monitored problems
both in my local area and across Cornwall
as a whole. It is clear that some dreadful mistakes were made and it has to be
concluded that Cory were inadequately prepared for the commencement of the
contract which has been mishandled.
Some of the lorries were too large to access certain Cornish
streets, the allocation of staff to new rounds compounded difficulties, and the
publicity relating to the new service could, and should, have been much, much
better. In the former Restormel area, for example, many of the residents did
not realise that the Conservative-led administration at County Hall had
downgraded their recycling collection from a weekly to a fortnightly service by
terminating the SERCO contract (which, for the record, I did not support).
But in all fairness, we must accept that it was a mammoth
undertaking to replace individual waste collection services from the former district
council areas with one Cornwall-wide service with 470,000 individual weekly
collections.
We should also commend those individuals on the frontline –
collecting our waste and recycling, or serving in the call centre – who have
worked extra hours to seek to resolve the problems caused by a massive failure
of management.
However, the time for excuses has passed. The leadership of
Cornwall Council and the management of Cory must get to grips with delivering
the new service and ensuring that it is of an extremely high standard for all
residents.
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