Weeks of missed bin and garden waste collections have left two councillors inundated with emails complaining about the poor service.
Brighton and Hove Independent councillor Mark Earthey said that the service appeared to be in “complete meltdown” as a flood of resident in Rottingdean and West Saltdean email him saying that their bins have not been emptied again.
Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons said that residents were just leaving their brown garden waste bins out in Westdene and Hove Park ward because they haven’t been emptied for six weeks.
Brighton and Hove City Council charges people who sign up for garden waste collections.
Residents in both wards appear to have given up using the council’s Contact Your Councillor web portal to reach their representatives.
Now they are emailing the two councillors directly, with both saying that they have received hundreds of complaints about missed collections in recent weeks.
Councillor Earthey said: “We get the same old excuse over and over again. Some of them are getting quite colourful now. If it was comedy or something like Little Britain, you’d laugh.
“A resident the other day got one that said: ‘We didn’t collect your garden rubbish because the team were reassigned to gritting the roads because of the recent frost.’
“That wasn’t February. That was the frost from a couple of weeks ago in March.
“The other was the managing agents didn’t mark the bin stores properly so we didn’t know there were any bins there.”
Councillor Earthey said that there were missed collection hot spots but the area was growing, including Wilkinson Close and Vaughn Williams Way, one of the new streets of houses on the site of the old St Aubyns School, in Rottingdean.
There were more at the top of Saltdean, he said, including Coombe Rise, Coombe Vale and Tumulus Road.
Councillor Earthey’s own bin has also been missed out. He lives in one of 15 streets that seem to be missed regularly by Cityclean, the council’s rubbish and recycling service.
Councillor Lyons said that his residents were receiving a standard email saying that workers were off sick. He wanted to know what was being done to resolve the issue with garden waste.
He said: “It’s collapsed. No garden waste collection for six weeks (in) multiple roads. It’s not just a couple of roads. It seems to be the whole ward.
“Residents feel they are being fobbed off. The service is quite expensive. It’s doubled in cost in the last few years but the number of missed collections has increased exponentially.
“I’ve never had so many emails on one particular topic and I thought the weeds would be the most communications. I’ve had 14 emails from residents overnight. I’ve submitted more than 100.”
The council said that there were two garden waste rounds in winter and three in summer, each with a driver and two loaders.
It said that there was a rolling cycle of vehicle replacement and two were due to arrive this month for the wider Cityclean fleet to increase reliability, with more on order.
Sickness levels had been higher in recent weeks but the council did not say what percentage of staff were unavailable for work.
With new housing, the council said that it was not always told when people had moved in. And some developers were reluctant to mark bin stores, making them hard to find.
Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, the council’s cabinet member for net zero and environmental services, said: “Unfortunately, in some areas our collections have recently not been as reliable as they should have been and I’d like to apologise to residents for the disruption to their service.
“We are working hard to make fundamental and systemic improvements in this area but, while this work continues, there will unfortunately be times where unforeseen problems will test the resilience of our service.
“Recently we have had high levels of sickness, which has had a particular impact on garden waste, but we are in the process of adding additional resources to prevent this happening in future.
“I’m also aware of some disruption to recycling in the Saltdean and Rottingdean area and would like to reassure residents that steps have been taken to address this.
“We are determined to make lasting and transformational changes to our collections service, including replacing our older vehicles with new ones and modernising the systems we use to manage the service.
“The outdated paper-based system we inherited is being replaced with a fully integrated digital system that will enable the team to reallocate collections in real time, manage the service much more efficiently and, crucially, provide much better information for residents.
“Our residents rightly expect a quality service and that is what we are focused on delivering.”
Burn your own garden waste like grandad used to. There, fixed it.
None of this is “unforeseen” as Cllr Tim Rowkins says. There hasn’t been a reliable bin service in Brighton and Hove for more than 20 years. Labour promised to fix it, they haven’t. The thing councillors recycle best are the same glib excuses year after year.
Not sure how many times I’ve heard the council roll out “old vehicles” and staff sickness as reasons for poor service. In every organisation staff get sick so you have measures in place to plug those gaps so essential services don’t crumble when that happens. The real issues run deeper that and have done for years – blaming staff sickness and old vehicles isn’t fooling anyone.
Perhaps if Labour tackled it properly back in 2019 when they had a good opportunity to address some of the deep ingrained issues at Cityclean things may have started to improve by now. Instead they held private meetings, refused to publish documents from those meetings, and kicked the can down the road. The KC report that cost nearly a quarter of a million pounds in 2023 inferred political interference, and the ripples from so many unresolved issues back then are still being felt.
None of this should be a surprise to Councillor Rowkins.
The real reason is incompetent management. Many roles duplicated and the bosses have never worked on the rounds. They plug the gaps with expensive agency workers and the fleet is just not up to standard. They move the garden waste workers to recycling on a whim when someone is sick. There is no resilience in this and the problems stem from idle pen-pushers sitting next to the (subsidised) canteen!
Incorrect. No subsidised canteen.
The real reason is 14 bin trucks most days are broken down due to the fleet being well and truly past it’s working life, not to mention a lack of mechanics. But that’s what happens when the previous administration (greens) blow £650K per electric truck.
I don’t understand why the councillor isn’t honest and say that the service is massively underfunded and on its arse.
Nothing to do with the electric ones the current administration got in May 2024, Just ones greens got??- Both Labour and Greens got electric ones, but it’s been Labour controlling the council for most of the last decade (apart from during the pandemic 2020-2023), so they can’t pretend service issues are nothing to do with them.
I don’t doubt your broad point that the service is on its arse, but new collections vehicles are needed, and I don’t see anything wrong with either Labour or Greens or anybody running the council buying electric when getting new. Diesel bin lorries are about £450K to buy and electric about £580K but lower running costs over time.
Shame so many bin lorries have been sabotaged and don’t work for that reason.
We are up in Tivoli Road and our collections of rubbish are regularly missed. We are getting frustrated after complaining many times. The amusing solutions from neighbours are keeping us laughing, but it’s beginning to pong up here.
“The outdated paper-based system we inherited is being replaced with a fully integrated digital system that will enable the team to reallocate collections in real time, manage the service much more efficiently and, crucially, provide much better information for residents.”
What is he talking about when he says “inherited”, it was a Labour council between 2015-2020 so they could have changed the system then. Is Tim Rowkins really trying to blame other political parties for not replacing the paper-based system during the height of the Covid pandemic after the Labour administration collapsed and they handed over control of the council to them. The way councillors deflect and spin things is really quite incredible!
Very outdated fleet, workshop has to put a request in to authorize parts when they are needed so vehicles off the road for days whilst they wait.
Have a look in the yard there’s always trucks parked along the wall that are broken/off the road.
Not enough staff to cope with standard sickness and jobs so garden waste crews get sacrificed over refuse and recycling.
The cllrs in their ivory towers in the wards don’t help with things as they don’t allow any budget and still have a overtime ban in place (you’d be surprised what can be done when people aren’t tied to a hard finish time, and what you would save on agency cost at the same time).
Currently when time is up crews drive to the tip as it can be anywhere from 10min to a hour to get tipped at the end (not a CityClean issue but Veolia speed).
We just keep repeating these same issues every time, but guess what nobody pulls their finger out to sort it properly.
And the digital system was put on indefinite hold due to cost so that’s just a non existent carrot
We have the same issue in roads around Withdean. In Tivoli Rd they’ve missed three of the last four of our collections, in the very month they sent a bill for thousands in council tax, followed by a leaflet from Labour trumpeting ‘success’ in improving CityClean services. They are just gaslighting us. The collection meltdown in our street has been going on for months. We get a different excuse every time. I’m not paying the first council tax instalment till the bin is emptied.
I’m constantly having to report missed general waste and recycling collections. All of which appear to just get ignored.
All that ever gets reported is excuse after excuse.
Cityclean – do the job we pay you to do.
I have to say that my road has had really good waste and recycling collections this year. I can’t comment on gardening waste, as i compost green waste. Honestly, not one collection day missed for a long time.
Is this you Councillor Mitchie Alexander?? If not, I get the feeling that ‘NorthBrightonSunshine’ is a fully paid up Labour Party member either way. Vaguely remember ‘NorthBrightonSunshine’ defending library closures, trying to claim that Cllr Burden didn’t resign from the Cabinet because of their opposition to Labour cuts, and sticking up for the council in every comment made.
Whoever you are, great for you that your bins are being collected, but it’s clear that many other people’s are not, so if NorthBrightonSunshine is a councillor, please don’t dismiss residents’ comments in an ‘I’m alright Jack’ kind of way – please accept that many people are not getting refuse and recycling collected. This is backed up by the council’s own figures – which show reported missed collections were up last year.
I am not a councillor or an MP and I’m not joined to any political party. I am just saying like it is. My bins have been collected as usual. I accept that some people are saying that they have not had their rubbish collected but I’m just saying that I have had my bins collected without problems.
At least you could say that they’re not doing a rubbish job.