Bin crisis company won’t lose a penny
Penalty clause suspended for three months:
THE private firm behind a council’s bin collection “crisis” which saw maggots infesting uncollected waste will not lose one penny of public funds, we can reveal.
A document released following a Freedom of Information request reveals the penalty clause for poor performance in Kier’s new £82m, sevenyear contract with Bridgend County Borough Council (BCBC) has been suspended for three months.
The performance framework states the suspension, which ran from the service start date of June 5, is “to allow the contractor sufficient time to implement and deal with any issues”.
It means the firm cannot be fined for the “chaos” caused by large numbers of missed rubbish and recycling collections during much of June which led to waste, including bags of nappies, sitting on kerbsides across the county for weeks in searing temperatures.
A Bridgend council spokesman said the framework “is consistent with other waste and recycling contracts of this type, and reflects common industry practice”.
Kier’s managing director, Julian Tranter, apologised at the time, with council leader Huw David admitting the firm’s performance “is clearly not good enough”.
Such was the scale of the backlog during the early-summer heatwave that Kier was forced to draft in extra men and vehicles.
Around 50 borough, town and community councillors also wrote an open letter to Coun David calling on him to “recognise the crisis that is unfolding” and the “chaos on our streets”.
The level of complaints has since subsided but independent community councillor Martin Williams said nearly two months in “collections are still being missed on a regular basis”.
Yet once the suspension expires the minimum number of penalty points Kier must incur in a month before they face the lowest-level fine of £625 is 5,000. Missed residential collections only attract two points per incident – meaning Kier would have to miss 2,500 collections in a single month to be docked money.
The value of the contract breaks down to being worth more than £900,000 a month to Kier.
The council spokesman said: “The missed collection threshold is not high when set against the fact that the contractor will carry out more than five million collections a year.
“It also accounts for just one of approximately 70 performance indicators, the penalty points for which are accumulative and which are added together for a final score.”
The performance framework states each missed collection must be “confirmed” before it attracts points – yet does not state how they are confirmed. The document also states Kier is responsible for reporting its own “performance standard failures” to Bridgend council.
The framework sets out how penalty points can also be incurred for other infractions including safety (up to 500 points per incident), failure to attend calls within the maximum call waiting-time (one point per occurrence), and failure to clean up and remove any spilled materials within 20 minutes (10 points).
Many of the failures have “rectification periods” of anything from minutes to months, during which points cannot be awarded. However, the points are multiplied if issues go repeatedly unresolved.
Coun Williams, the newly elected chairman of the Change For Bridgend group, secured the contract award notice following a Freedom of Information request. It states the total value of the contract is £82m.
He said: “A great deal of our money is being spent via this contract – it’s essential that we know the details.
“There is undoubtedly a desire amongst BCBC leaders to ‘move on’ from this refuse story and there may be accusations that many are fixated with it when there are bigger issues.
“The fact is that the whole handling of the new recycling regime poses serious questions about how BCBC operates.”
A council spokesman said: “The performance framework...requires the contractor to receive, action and resolve complaints before reporting the process back to the council.
“The council’s role is to then monitor and audit the process.
“Service change on this scale cannot be implemented without experiencing problems and teething issues, so there are no penalties during the first 12 weeks in order to give the service a sufficient chance to get up and running.
“Similarly, the contractor agrees not to claim against the council during this period, eg for dealing with additional waste.
“This is a common practice that avoids companies having to factor costs into their bids designed to protect them from penalties incurred during the initial launch period – fining them from day one would ultimately prove to be a false economy.”