When we had prayers before last night’s Council meeting- the Bible reading was Psalms Chapter 1 , Verse 1 :
“Blessed is the man who … sitteth not in the seat of the mockers”.
Well, we were sitteth in the seats of the Liberal Democrats, and Tory Councillor Michael Starke, the cabinet member for recycling, had to give an explanation of what wrongwith the the start of the new recycling system. . It would have been easy to have mocked him – but were weren’t going to bully a chap who had done his best and only just come out of hospital. However we mentioned the things that had gone wrong, asked some questions and learned a lot.
Michael was very apologetic – he apologised more times in 5 minutes than any councillor in the last 20 years. In his own words, some residents have been ‘let down very very badly’.
From the 18th-25th July the council received more than 5000 phone calls and emails, of which 1300 involved missing bins and missing information packs. So at least 1300 people didn’t get information packs or bins. Add in the people who didn’t bother to phone, or couldn’t get through, or contacted the contractor Sita, and the numbers are probably several thousand.
The real cause of the problem was that the council thought that Sita were going to do some minor tinkering with the delivery days. But instead Sita altered the days for 30 percent of households, and didn’t get all the delivery packs out. So the council information phonelines were swamped.As of yesterday, there were still 400 bins to be delivered., and the missing information packs were being sent out by mail.
Despite all this, there seems to have been an enthusiastic response from the public.
The future of recycling looks good, but it does leave one question. Just how robust is our Cabinet system when a key person goes into hospital at a crucial time?