Tories pay the price for failures on bins, litter and potholes

ABOUT a week before the local election, a friend who lives in Trafford made a prediction out of the blue.

“If the Tories lose the council on Thursday it will be because of the Amey contract,” he forecast firmly, referring to the town hall’s controversial outsourced environmental services provider. “Everywhere’s absolutely filthy.” A few days later, that is exactly what happened. Labour wrestled four seats from the Conservatives, leaving them on 30 – one more than the Tories’ 29. Neither party has a majority, with the town hall in no overall control. Tory leader Sean Anstee has ruled out forming a coalition with a smaller party.

Labour insiders say the party is confident of doing a deal and forming an administration.

The Conservative party’s flagship urban northern council, one it had prided as being professionally and efficiently-run, was, in the end, undone in large part by the basics: litter, potholes and overflowing bins.

Trafford has long been the Tory badge of honour in Greater Manchester – and, consequently, Labour’s biggest bugbear.

Since 2004, the town hall had stayed stubbornly Conservative. While other nearby authorities, including Bury and Stockport, tipped over into Labour hands from either the Tories or the Liberal Democrats during the coalition years, Trafford became reassuring evidence for David Cameron and later for Theresa May that their party was not completely toxic in the north. But, by the time 2018’s poll rolled round, the Tories were down to a majority of just three in the town hall.

Messaging around low council tax wasn’t cutting through in the way that it used to, as local services started to wobble. Getting on for half of the borough’s care homes had been ranked inadequate. Potholes were proliferating.

But the biggest, most widely-felt problem had come with the outsourced Amey contract, signed in 2015: a 23-year partnership drawn up to provide bin, street cleaning, street lighting and parks services in a deal said by the council at the time to be ‘ground-breaking.’ It quickly started to go wrong. Councillors were flooded with complaints from residents furious about unemptied bins, dirty parks, blocked gullies and flooded streets. Within 18 months of it being announced, Labour locally had branded the new set-up an ‘utter disaster.’

Amey missed targets – and is understood to have been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result – but council insiders also admit that from the outset there was too little money in the contract, which had been ambitiously designed to slash £3m a year from the environmental services budget.

At the same time, in a situation