Agenda and minutes

There were no declarations of interest at the meeting.

To note.

The Task and Finish Group Members noted the terms of references, which had been updated to reflect the amendments made at the previous meeting.

This reports presents a range of information as background and evidence to support the Task and Finish Group to review of the Council’s Waste and Street Cleansing Contract.

The Chairman of the Task and Finish Group asked those present to introduce themselves.

The Director of Place then outlined the report which presented a range of information as background and evidence. This had been pre circulated, and published, in advance of the meeting to support the Task and Finish Group in their review of the Council’s Waste and Street Cleansing Contract.

The Chairman then invited the Task and Finish Group Members to ask questions of those present, which included the following:

·         With regard to the Cabinet report (appendix 1), some details had been redacted. Did the other contractor, Biffa, score more highly on any key indicators? Was all the information around Biffa’s bid put before Cabinet to inform their decision?

·         Could more information be provided on the Echo IT System, and V-watches?

·         How prescriptive was Echo? For example, members of the public who lived on a street which backed onto another street were being told to put their bins out in a set location, which could mean they were having to carry their bin down steps etc.

·         There were some instances where whole streets had been missed for food waste collection, but the bins had been marked as collected. How had this happened?

·         There had been some cases where those with assisted delivery had been missed, how had this happened? There had also been a report where the key of a member of the public who had an assisted collection had got lost.

·         Were the Veolia workforce consulted prior to the changes in terms of route optimisation?

·         What percentage of data had been missing following the import of information from M3, and what percentage was accurate? Did the Echo system analyse the data put into it? How was modelling carried out?

·         Was the modelling and analytics information which was submitted as part of the bid sense checked?

·         When the decision to proceed with the contract was made, were the changes as a result of the pandemic, and the lack of HGV drivers factored in?

·         If Veolia were losing money on the previous contract, why did they bid for the new contract? Why not raise the price of the bid, and focus on efficiencies later?

·         What sort of risk assessment process had been carried out prior to the contract being signed?

·         When the route optimisation changes were bought in at DDC, would it have made more sense to fix the issues there prior to roll out at FHDC?

·         What assurances had been sought by FHDC that the new optimisation proposal was robust?

·         What progress had been made in correcting the issues around the lack of information carried over from the previous CRM system?

·         How had the shift patterns been changed? Did the new patterns mean more working hours for operatives?

·         Why were the Veolia Union representatives not present?

·         Could Veolia sum up what they thought had gone wrong?

·         What were the latest collection figures?

·         The latest collection rates seemed quite high, when there were still a large number of bins  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.