Total of 6,700 complaints in a year
Bins account for half of all council gripes
BIRMINGHAM City Council’s customer services received over 6,700 complaints in a single year – more than half of which were about bins.
The figures come despite the fact overall resident satisfaction levels with the department have improved significantly since it was brought back in-house five years ago.
The authority received 6,768 complaints between July 2018 and June this year.
A total of 3,730 were made about waste management with the period including several months of industrial action during the alleged ‘secret payments’ row between unions.
The top five issues related to: Missed bin collections ........... 1,013 Missed recycling collections... 598 Behaviour of workers ............... 418 Replacement bins .................... 312 Garden waste service ............... 303 In other areas, housing repairs accounted for 2,138 complaints in the period, particularly about property services firm Fortem (764), the revenues and benefits department racked up 443, customers services themselves accounted for 242 while highways clocked up 215.
The figures were revealed in a customers services report presented to the council’s Co-ordinating scrutiny committee on Friday.
Focusing on waste, committee chair Cllr Carl Rice (Lab, North Edgbaston) said: “I have had more complaints or enquiries through my email about waste in the last two to three years than in my previous 30 years on the council. We have been
collecting bins for 150 years in Birmingham, what is suddenly meant that we can’t do it in a reasonable way? So we are going to find out.
“Is it poor management, underinvestment, incompetent politicians past or present, or is it the workforce? Maybe it’s a combination of all those things.”
He went on to divert blame from customers services saying they were part of the “solution” and “not the problem”.
Cllr Liz Clements (Lab, Bournville and Cotteridge) echoed the concerns and referenced a recent Local Government Ombudsman report criticising the waste department.
She said the report “shames” the council but called for honesty around the “systemic failures” in the waste department as opposed to blaming strike action.
Wendy Griffiths, assistant director for customer services and business support, stated there was a dedicated team of four staff, one in each waste depot, to handle bins complaints.
She said they were very “engaged” but admitted the situation was “very, very challenging”.
Ms Griffiths added: “Sometimes it is quite surprising for people to hear that customers are frustrated with the service and they just need their bins emptied and until we get to that point we will continually go around in this circle.”
Customer services currently handles around two million calls and 60,000 emails a year. It was brought in-house from Capita in 2014. The move has saved £4 million a year while customer satisfaction has improved from around 49 per cent to between 70 to 80 per cent.