No garden waste collections for a month as bin firm gets more cash to pay staff
SERCO STRUGGLING TO RETAIN WORKERS ON £10.82 AN HOUR
GARDEN waste bins in the Derbyshire Dales will not be collected for a month and disruption to pick-ups may stretch on for a further three months.
At a lengthy meeting last week, Derbyshire Dales District Council agreed to prop up private firm Serco to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, for the third time in a year.
Serco is struggling to retain staff and give them a salary higher than £10.82 an hour, and asked the council – and as a result, taxpayers – to stand a pay rise.
After hours of debate, councillors agreed to give Serco the cash and follow through with plans to suspend garden waste collections for an entire month in a bid to quash the current “emergency” situation regarding thousands of missed pickups. This was despite calls to send the highly profitable firm packing.
The motion to provide between £28,856 and £150,848 for a pay hike for Serco staff over the next eight months came down to a deciding vote from the Conservative chair of the council, Ashbourne councillor Sue Bull.
Cllr Paul Cruise said it was a “David vs Goliath” contest and that “Serco has put us over a barrel”.
Residents in the Dales are now in the first year in which they have paid £50 for garden waste collections and now their service has been scrapped due to the deteriorating condition of the district’s bin collection service.
Councillors agreed that subscribing residents would be given a £15 discount if they choose to re-subscribe next year – leaving a £35 fee. Residents had called for a full refund. A total of 18,300 residents pay for garden waste collections.
Councillors also voted to waive financial penalties for Serco for each bin missed, along with other key targets to monitor performance.
Cllr Peter Slack said the authority should not give money to a firm which has “increased its profits enormously” during the pandemic. He said council funds “would be better spent on businesses that are struggling, instead of a multi-millionpound business”.
He said: “Surely we can’t keep subsidising this company forever?”
This comes after the council has propped up Serco with £350,000 over the past year already, despite thousands of missed collections.
Serco, which made £120 million profits during the pandemic, has said its bin colafter lection contract in the Dales is “not profitable” and that it has already “absorbed costs” of £130,000. A number of key issues are causing the emergency in the Dales, which has seen the council call on the military and fire service to help it empty bins.
These include the exodus of European HGV drivers following Brexit, the stopping of HGV driver training during lockdowns, the pay and competition for workforce, and the requirement for staff to self-isolate if they catch Covid or are identified as a close contact. Ronnie Coutts, managing director at Serco Environmental Services, told the meeting that the company apologises for the disruption caused to residents. Paul Wilson, chief executive of the district council, also apologised for the disruption.
Bin collections in the Dales have already been significantly disrupted for well over a month, with residents fuming about the lack of communication they have received.
Serco says it has a requirement for a total of 29 bin collection staff to maintain the service and allow for holiday and sick cover.
However, it currently has just 16 staff to carry out its duties, Mr Coutts said at Tuesday night’s meeting.
There is said to be a 16 per cent gap in HGV vacancies nationally but Serco’s Dales team is now down to less than half its required workforce.
Mr Coutts said attracting drivers to work in the Dales has been “complex” and it is aiming to make the area more “attractive” to work in by boosting salaries.
He also said the firm was “upskilling” its current workforce, for no extra pay, so they could carry out more roles.
Mr Coutts said the firm had to be “realistic” and that there were “two to three months of challenges” still to come.
He said one of the major impacts to current services has been a mass influx in cardboard waste being presented by residents as a result of an online shopping boom.
This, he says, has seen cardboard tonnage increase by 19 per cent in the Dales and up to 50 per cent in some collections.
Mr Coutts said Serco feels it is “reasonable” to ask for extra monies from the district council, because it is already taking on extra costs and the bin collection contract is a shared one.
He said the firm, whose £120 million profit is six times the annual spending budget of the district
council, has had to pay out substantial sums for overtime for staff to work weekends on time-anda-half and double pay.
Mr Coutts said that if the council did not approve the extra money to give Serco staff a pay rise then the significant disruptions to services would continue for longer.
He said the pay rise would help to “keep the people we have got and attract others” which would help to “get through this period of instability”.
Mr Coutts said it was having conversations with all of the 24 local authorities it provides bin collection services for, some of which included talks of rates of pay and others for reducing services.
He also said: “The issue isn’t about profitability, if it was, Serco would absorb that. This is a service performance issue.
“There will be reduced profitability for our contract, it is not profitable for us.”
Lee Gardner, the council’s legal adviser, said the authority would be liable to pay Serco compensation if it were to terminate the contract without following the due process of warnings over a period of time for failing specific collection targets.
Cllr Jason Atkin said the authority was “stuck between a rock and a hard place, the residents need their bins emptying”.
Cllr Peter O’brien repeated his call for a full investigation into the current eight-year contract with Serco, saying the act of giving the firm more money on a regular basis was a “sticking-plaster approach”.
Councillors said a company the size of Serco should have been aware of the impact of Brexit several years the referendum and that online shopping was a cause of the boom in household cardboard recycling.
Cllr O’brien said the authority should not be “propping up” Serco again and that the council should say “it is your problem, you sort it out, don’t come crying to us”.
Cllr Sue Hobson, deputy leader of the council, said the authority needed to learn from mistakes around lack of communication given to residents over the current situation and needed to act now to help quash issues with the service.
Cllr Colin Swindell said there have been problems with collections for “several months” and there had been issues with Serco under its previous contract. He said it was “unreasonable” for the firm to be asking for more money, when it has “failed” to pay staff a decent wage” and “failed to retain staff due to working conditions” and “failed to prepare for Brexit”.
Cllr Swindell said some residents have lost faith in the council over the ongoing bin collection issues, particularly those who have paid for garden waste pick-ups, only for them to be suspended with no refund.
He said the council should not provide a “taxpayer-funded bailout”.
Cllr Andrew Shirley said it was “easy to stare Serco out” and not give it extra money, but that would leave residents with bin collection disruptions well into the winter.
Amber Valley, Derbyshire Dales, Derby and Erewash have also suspended garden bin collections this month because they face the same issues.
Surely we can’t keep subsidising this company forever?
Cllr Peter Slack
It is your problem, Secro... you sort it out, don’t come crying to us
Cllr Peter O’brien