Question from Councillor J Williams to the Cabinet Member for Communities

“In view of the continuing and overwhelming number of complaints being received by Councillors regarding the poor standard of service currently provided by Kier, what action is the Cabinet Member for Communities taking to address mounting public anger and genuine frustration at this totally unacceptable situation in which we now find ourselves?”

Question from Councillor T Thomas to the Cabinet Member for Communities    

“What KPI’s are specially attached to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the Kier recycling and refuse contract?”

Question from Councillor J Williams to the Cabinet Member for Communities

“In view of the continuing and overwhelming number of complaints being received by Councillors regarding the poor standard of service currently provided by Kier, what action is the Cabinet Member for Communities taking to address mounting public anger and genuine frustration at this totally unacceptable situation in which we now find ourselves?”

Response:

‘Obviously, the service Kier have provided over recent weeks has fallen short of what the Council expects and what local residents deserve, and this position is totally unacceptable to this Council. I completely understand the frustration and anger of some of those residents that have experienced problems and received a poor service.

Since the last Council meeting on May 31^st  officers have continued to be in regular contact with senior Kier managers every day, including most weekends,  and Kier are in absolutely no doubt about how disappointed we are about the underperformance issues and their failure to resolve some of them quickly enough.   Senior officers also meet regularly with the Leader, Deputy Leader and Cabinet colleagues about this matter and the Leader has escalated our concerns to the highest level within Kier, writing a very strongly worded letter to the overall Kier Chief Executive last week demanding immediate action.

Additionally the Leader and Corporate Director Communities insisted last week that the Managing Director of Kier Environmental Services, Mr Julian Tranter, attend an urgent meeting in Bridgend to  address our most immediate concerns, particularly with regard to a build-up of missed collections throughout the County Borough. This resulted in a number of short term actions to clear waste from the streets including;

1. a short term arrangement to allow in some cases the ‘ mixing ‘ of waste to allow collection rounds to be completed more quickly in view of the exceptionally hot temperatures experienced last week.

2. the induction and employment of over 20 additional staff [ including 5 drivers ] to provide greater resilience and allow all available resources to be deployed and targeted appropriately

3. additional rounds arranged to collect recycling from Monday June 26^th ,so that there are now 18 rounds ‘ manned ‘ by a driver plus 2 operatives to collect the significantly increased amount of recycling material that is being generated.

4. an additional vehicle deployed to collect AHP waste

5. a ‘courier’ type company engaged to accelerate the delivery of outstanding recycling container and bag deliveries and remove the backlog. These have again been much more than originally envisaged as each household in theory should have already had a food caddy, but there have been many thousands of requests for new ones.

All of these actions are at no additional cost to the Council.

In addition, the Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Communities, together with the Head of Neighbourhood Services, visited the Kier Depot in Tondu this week   to meet local managers and look at and discuss the current operation. It is very clear that the contract is now much better resourced than previously and that finally Kier are being much more proactive in seeking to resolve the issues of concern. Kier report that their most significant challenge has been the substantial increase in the amount of recycling collected on the streets, which in these early weeks of the new arrangements has averaged well above what was originally envisaged and modelled. This is good news in that demonstrates that the Council’s scheme will be successful and allow us to meet statutory Welsh Government recycling targets but the implementation and execution of the scheme by Kier thus far has not been good enough in some areas.

All Cabinet members have made it clear that in the main the locally based staff and operatives have been performing well and working incredibly hard but in our opinion have been let down by some of the initial resourcing and management of the contract at a regional and UK level.

Kier are confident that now they have substantially increased the resourcing of the contract that the most significant problems will not reoccur. The Council will of course rigorously pursue them on this. The vast majority of waste was cleared by the end of the weekend just gone as planned but there are still a couple of areas where streets were missed and additionally there remain isolated properties that have been missed throughout the County Borough.  Clearly everything will not be as specified immediately and some level of missed collections is unfortunately  ‘normal ‘ in the early days of any new waste contract of this magnitude, the reported national norm is about a 4% ‘failure‘ rate in the early stages. Kier in the main are managing to collect at around about this level but there have been some days where they have slipped substantially below this figure, of course the Council does not condone any failure to provide the specified levels of service.

As a result of the actions that have been implemented and I have outlined above I will now expect to see a rapid improvement in overall contract performance

A Member asked what the rationale was for proposing to rollout the new service to residents in June, rather than in September when the vehicles were ready. The Corporate Director Communities explained that during negotiations with Kier, the original date proposed was April 1^st but it soon became apparent that due to delays in signing the contract they would not be ready in time.  BCBC did not want to defer any longer than necessary or there would be risk of not meeting recycling performance targets

A Member asked what action the Authority were going to take against Kier for the severe disruption caused at the start of the contract due to missed collections, delays in delivering recycling materials to residents and lack of communication with residents on their poor service. 

The Deputy Leader stated that Kier had no doubt let the Authority down.  He thanked Kier Bridgend, as their staff had been fantastic in responding to the chaos with limited resource.  He assured members that the Authority were in constant contact with Kier UK and they were in no doubt about the anger we are facing as an Authority because of their miscalculations.  The Authority Insisted they increase their resource which they have done so, they now have 13 staff answering calls and have an extra 6 rounds of collections in force.  He reaffirmed that their actions are unacceptable and assured members that the extra resources were being funded by Kier UK and not the Authority. 

A Member asked if BCBC were following Welsh Government policy and guidance regarding the recycling of materials and separating them into different boxes and bags before collections.  The Corporate Director Communities confirmed that the Welsh Government Blue Print Strategy encourages separating recycling as there is less contamination, greater value and is more cost effective.   However, he added that it was difficult to know if they would continue to encourage this in the future and could be reviewed moving forward.  He explained that BCBC’s methodology was currently showing much higher recycling than anticipated and we are already close to achieving recycling targets in Wales due to the recent changes that had been implemented. He added that the current contract with Kier was awarded to Kier UK through a competitive tender process and they had previously provided this service to BCBC with successful results including the lowest waste collection costs in Wales for the last 7 years, a Citizens panel with 86% happy with the service that Kier had provided and low member of referrals.   He added however that he did not condone their actions now but the reality was they were best placed to deliver contract and when they get it right it will work very well. 

Question from Councillor T Thomas to the Cabinet Member for Communities

“What KPI’s are specially attached to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the Kier recycling and refuse contract?”

Response:

‘The Contract with Kier includes a comprehensive performance framework schedule which sets out the required performance standards, the performance deductions for failure to meet those performance standards and the monitoring and reporting arrangements on  a daily, weekly , monthly and annual basis. The details of this are part of the commercial contract with Kier.

In terms of KPI’s the only indicators that need to be reported publically relate to the statutory national requirement to meet and report on the percentage of recycling achieved for waste collected. The new waste contract was designed to ensure that the Council moves from its 2016/17 percentage of just over 58 % to the required level of 64 % by 2019, and moves towards the statutory target of 70 % that is set for 2024. Early indications are that the restriction on residual waste of two bags per fortnight for most households and the increased recycling options available, will allow the Council to achieve the next statutory target of 64% within the term of this 7 year contract and indeed move towards the top of Welsh Local Authorities in terms of recycling percentage achieved. It is however still early days in term of the new arrangements and we will be better able to accurately predict what Bridgend is likely to achieve in a few months’ time’.

A Member stated that they still did not know what KPIs were attached to the Kier UK contract and suggested that the Corporate Overview and Scrutiny Committee look at this further Recycling improvements reassurance.  Need public good will on our side.

Members hoped that performance indicators would include resident satisfaction levels as these had been less than satisfactory from the start.  And asked if these would be in the public domain to allow to be scrutinised. 

The Corporate Director Communities stated that the Council takes seriously the needs of residents.  He added that the contract needs time to bed in before scrutiny can look at this to give Kier a chance to improve their service.  He stated that evidence has shown this week that the level of missed collections has fallen, call centres are answering all calls and the public are able to leave messages.  Whilst all this was progress he stated that they now needed to ensure improvements are sustained and continued.  He informed Members that the Citizen Panel will be asked to provide feedback but that it was sensible to bed in first.  He stated that before the contract was in place residents were concerned about being able to comply with the two bag waste rule but this has already demonstrated by high compliance that the speculation is different to reality.

A Member referred to missed collections, particularly those that included collections with AHP and was concerned that some of public were having their dignity affected by these missed collections and this was unnecessarily prolonging their embarrassment.  She asked if Cabinet Members had looked into changing this process.

The Deputy Leader stated that this could be looked at in the scrutiny process and during the three month bedding in process.  He added that Kier had recently doubled the AHP collections to enable them to catch up on missed collections and that these collections were considered a priority in clearing rubbish away from the streets.