Birmingham waste chief: Bins service should be invisible
BIRMINGHAM’S bin collections should be an “invisible” service, the city council’s waste boss has declared.
Cllr John O’Shea has been in the re-designed city council cabinet post for Street Scene and Parks for little over a month, although the emails about missed bins had already started flying in well before his appointment was made official.
He comes in as the third person to hold the bins portfolio in 12 months, on the back of a disruptive strike over union member payments and at a time when the service is still adapting to major changes prompted by the 2017 industrial dispute.
But there has been recent cause for optimism with the council approving a £12 million programme to replace around 250 waste vehicles over the next three years, including dozens of old and failing bin lorries.
In an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service. Cllr O’Shea spoke at length about the challenges facing the waste service, how it’s getting better and the role residents have to play in keeping their neighbourhoods tidy.
What was your reaction when asked to take on the role?
If you are asked to do any cabinet role you take that seriously. It is working at the top level of your city in local authority, and I want to do that. I did give it some thought. On a practical basis, I’ve had another job [working for MP Jess Phillips] and this is not like a contract, I could be gone tomorrow morning. I have a mortgage and children to pay for.
But I wasn’t daunted about taking on the bins – and the parks. I have been dealing with that for the past seven years as a councillor. My skill-set is with hard services like this. One of the first things I did as a councillor was go on the radio and defend the roll-out of wheelie bins, which no-one is concerned about anymore. I know it’s challenging, but if you don’t want to be challenged don’t go into local government.
It was recently reported up to 900 bins are being missed a day in Birmingham – what is the current level of performance?
It has got better but it is nowhere near good enough. There’s a half a million houses we collect from a week – it’s about 1,000 tons of domestic waste a day so it is a huge undertaking. One of our depots is the size of a district council in its entirety. It’s a big operation.
Yes it’s challenging but I know we have made it work in the past, I know we have got good people out there doing the job and we’ll listen to them to make it work. My job here is to hold the officers to account for their performance and make sure the unions deliver on what they have promised. We have a really close working relationship with the unions at the moment.
There’s work to do. I apologise to the people of Birmingham about this. Be assured it’s my focus to get the bin service right. It’s the one service everybody uses and when it goes wrong everybody sees it’s gone wrong.
It’s been said that the new rounds – caused by the move from a four- to five-day working week – are one of the main problems. Can you elaborate on the issues?
Some of them are straightforward. I picked up one recently where two vans butted up against each other. Each thought the other one was doing a particular property. They hadn’t, no-one was doing it, it hadn’t been done for several weeks. That’s now been fixed.
All of these rounds have been put together with the complete consultation and agreement with the unions, the workforce.
As with everything, until you try it and try it for a little while, you don’t understand where the niggles are. The strike got in the way but now we are getting into that.
We’ve got three of the four depots working pretty much where they should be and one that has been behind, that’s the Redfern Depot, serving the south and east of the city.
But there’s good work going on there with the manager and union rep who have sat down and gone through things in detail. We’ve seen improvements over the last couple of weeks. It’s a process, it takes a while to work through.
It’s going to get better. I can see it getting better but it doesn’t feel like that on the streets for residents yet.
Cllr John O’Shea
The £12 million waste vehicle replacement programme will include “re-profiling ” the fleet. What benefits will that bring? We’ll be able to look at having