“There’s no magic wand, there’s no new pot of money,” councillors were told as they raised the possibility of more funding for waste and cleansing services in the light of recent bin collection chaos.
Suggestions were for additional investment to ease pressures on teams after 27,000 isle households moved to the ‘simpler recycling’ scheme.
Until April this year, those 27,000 households received non standard collections. This meant that they were not offered all of the waste and recycling services on the ‘standard’ rounds.
But from April 13 they were moved to fortnightly waste and recycling collections and weekly food waste pick ups.
The move has not gone smoothly, with almost 4,000 calls to customer services related to missed bin collections between April and June this year. Many more residents say they simply could not get through to raise their concerns.
Increased workload
Part of the issue has been an increase in new households on the isle without a corresponding increase in resources.
The last time a new round was added to the collection service was in September 2020. As a rule of thumb a whole round can accommodate between 4,000 and 5,000 properties. The addition of circa 4,300 dwellings since then effectively represents a new round on its own that has to be collected by the existing staff and vehicle fleet.
Between February 2 and April 12 some 526 bins were missed for standard collections and 272 for the new simpler recycling homes.
But from April 13 to June 12 although missed bins on standard rounds only rose slightly to 584, the simpler recycling missed collections shot up to 1108.
To try and tackle the problems two new collection rounds were added on July 1 for the next six months at a cost of £188k for vehicles, crew, fuel and vehicle servicing.
Extra budget?
Discussing the problems at a meeting on Tuesday (July 14) Cllr Helen Crittenden said: “Over the last few years there have been times of reorganisation and rationalising services and route optimisation to ‘maintain services within budget.’
“Before simpler recycling came in, services were pretty much at capacity because we had already been doing all of that optimisation and we were probably a little over optimistic about the impact of changes…
“Bearing in mind… the service is already pretty much at capacity and bearing in mind that we have had and will have more properties coming online, are there any thoughts and thinking ahead for the budget for 2027-28.
“We are already doing an increase in service and spending for what’s happening now and that’s going to last over six months until January but I’m thinking that the reality is, do we need to expand on the budget in order to carry this forward because we are already stretched, that’s not going to unstretch it – just putting it right in the short term.”
Director of Environment Mike Humber said the independent review of the service would look at those issues and then, if needed, that would be fed into next year’s budget.
‘Things will have to go’
But Cllr Steve Albon, who heads up the cleansing portfolio, said: “For me to go through the process of trying to get the budget extended considerably past what we have had for this year…things will have to go elsewhere because we won’t have that money. So, that’s the difficulty that we would have to deal with.
“My own view is that we have seen most of our residents don’t care when we have done good things but when it comes to waste and when it comes to their bin being emptied, that’s their number one priority. So, as far as I am concerned, the number one priority for me is to get the money into the budget so that this doesn’t happen next year. Also, we have to take these new houses – I think there’s 9,000 all told along towards Manston.
“I think there is one other issue here, a lot of those planning applications that are being built now, were approved quite some years ago and have been started and then stopped and they are (now) all coming online at the same time.
“Now, I’m not blaming anybody but I would have thought that we should, as a council, have been looking at that and put enough resources in for those extra 9000 houses that are coming onboard, which we didn’t do because – whatever administration was in charge- it’s easy to go with what you’ve got and think ‘that’s in the future, we won’t bother with that.’ But this to me shows you that that’s not the way forward and not what we should be doing or we should have done.”
‘No magic wand’
Head of Finance Matthew Sanham told councillors: “When we set the budget for 2026/27, members will recall that we were looking at 2027/28 in the context of a £1.1m deficit before we do anything else.
“You are not just talking about delivering savings to invest in waste services, you are talking about how we manage the impact of that £1.1m as well.
“Some of what’s being talked about is lack of investment. Whenever there has been a case put forward for additional round capacity we have considered it at the time as part of the growth and star chamber process.
“Historically, when we last looked at potential for additional rounds it was agreed that it could be managed within the existing capacity in the context of there were efficiencies that could be made.
“The other thing is, when we are talking about investment, I keep coming back to the same point. One of the key things with regards to managing the budget is the issue of agency and sickness.
“Once we get the agency and sickness levels down there is automatically more available money within the service because it’s not being spent on cover.
“The budget process for the coming year is going to be difficult as it is and I just want to manage expectations because there is no magic wand, there is no new pot of money.”
Funding
The waste and cleansing service has a £7.1m budget for 2026-27 and 132 staff on the books with additional agency staff drafted in when needed.
There is an additional investment of £500,000 for cleansing and extended funding for beach and toilet cleaning.
The crews collect waste and recycling from 77,000 homes, equating to an average 30,400 bags every day.
An extra £400k was allocated to setting up the simpler recycling scheme, including £142k from the government.
However, the Kent County Council contribution of £300k towards recycling costs has been axed.
Thanet council is also unable to dip into its reserves to add funding to the waste service as they are at a critically low level following significant drawdowns to cover structural budget overspends.
After a £4.7m drawdown in 2024/25, General Fund reserves dropped below £6 million, representing the absolute minimum required for the council to remain financially functional and leaving minimal contingency for unforeseen emergencies.
Mr Sanham said: “If we were forecasting an overspend on cleansing services it is now going to be a bigger overspend until such time as we can identify where funding is coming from.
“In an ideal world that wouldn’t be the situation, we would have significant reserves and we would be able to just make the decision to take it from there. We are not in that position, so over the course of this year we would be looking at managing that position down so it’s no worse, but there is no new money available.”
‘Known pressures’
Thanet Conservative leader Cllr George Kup, who had brought a cross party motion to council previously asking for an explanation of the missed collections issue, said he wanted to know why, despite the known pressures, decisions were taken to proceed with the scheme in the way they were.
He added: “It seems clear that many of the pressures on the service weren’t new. Housing growth, high sickness levels, declining overtime and reduced resilience were already placing the service under strain before these changes were introduced.
“Yet, despite those known pressures, the council decided to proceed with implementation before those underlying pressures had been addressed.
“The report also tells us that some of the assumptions behind those changes proved, in its own words, “with hindsight, ambitious.”
“Residents understand that significant service changes carry risks. What they rightly expect is that those risks are properly assessed, managed and, wherever possible, mitigated before they affect thousands of households.”
He said that residents simply want to know that when they put their bin out on collection day, it will be emptied.
Food waste
Cllr John Davis said the money must be found to invest in the service, adding: “It’s not an overspend, it’s an under budget.”
He added: “Food waste collecting, weekly, it’s the simplest thing of all because it’s not on a staggered cycle. If that is got right all else becomes far less of a problem because it’s the food waste that is causing bins to look like buckets of minestrone on a hot day…
“If we get the food waste cleared, that’s the priority bang on the nail, everything else is much less toxic if it hasn’t got the food waste in it. The recycling can sit there for several days if necessary…”
He added: “Instead of sitting waffling for months on end and sitting redrafting this and talking about that, and having talking shops, let’s act.
“The action should be simple, clear the food. That’s what causes the detritus, the smell and the problem with pests, the other (waste/recycling) are less critical.”
During the meeting, councillors also raised the issue of workers’ welfare, better communication with residents and the possible redistribution of rounds. The rise in recycling, from around 35% to almost 40% was also noted.
Embarrassment
Scrutiny panel chairman Cllr Phil Fellows said: “It’s been chaos, there’s no two ways about it, the last couple of months it’s been embarrassing to be a councillor. We were accused of bringing the motion to try and embarrass the administration but it’s been embarrassing and we should be proud to be councillors and be proud in this last year and being members of the council but every contact I have had with members of the public is ‘what’s going on with TDC, why aren’t the bins being collected?'”
Apology
At the beginning of the meeting Cllr Albon issued an apology for failings in the service. He said: I would like to be clear, the number of missed collections over the last few months has been unacceptable. Residents have a right to timely collections and I am sorry we have not been able to do that for everyone recently.”
The argument does not make sense. Adding an additional 4,300 houses to the schedules would indeed put pressure on the collection rounds. But these would be 4,300 houses paying council tax – so where did this additional income go? The first priority should be to increase the budgets for essential services. After all, that is supposed to be the purpose of paying council tax. Perhaps we should have asked different simple questions such as:-
1. What is the increase in numbers of houses served.
2. What is the increase in council tax revenue generated from this growth in households.
3. What increase has waste and recycling received from this income.
Avril, 43000 homes paying £1 k a year in c/ gas is what £4.3 million ,and that council says no money there, absolute joke
The maths is not quite that simple.
Some 85% of council tax goes to KCC. TDC retains less than 15%.
Those on benefits and low incomes do not pay the full amount. Then there are those who simply do not pay in any event.
The bottom line is that if you want a better service then you are going to have to pay more . . .
But without a breakdown of the numbers it’s all meaningless . However average council tax is going to be nearer 2250 than 1000, 4300 homes gives 1.4million for tdc’s 15%.
Obviously tdc has more to do with that than just rubbish. Numbers of those claiming full or part council tax support, we’d need council to tell us that. Non payment well there are legal routes to get that.
However we had Rob Yates proudly saying tdc had decided to increase council tax support by 1.3 million this year. So that’s a big extra bit of expenditure that was seemingly found without difficulty.
The changes to refuse collection have been known for some time, rather seems as thpugh there was no real planning for the changes.
TDC introduced a policy this year that all non-working Universal Credit claimants no longer need to pay any Council Tax at all. They previously paid a small percentage of it.
As others have said, the cost of it was huge and reduces the taxable capacity of the whole district. For a district like Thanet where there is high benefit dependency and limited public funds it was a stupendously dumb thing to do but totally in line with usual Labour/Welfare Party approach where people on benefits get constant income increases and those workers who don’t claim anything continue to be stitched up at every opportunity.
Thanetion, but it’s worse than that , the 1.3 million giveaway is the gross uncollected, tdc would only have got 15% ish of that, but the rest of the council tax recipients ( police, fire and rescue, kcc) are still going to want their cut so in the absence of anything official it’d probably be fair to assume that the rest of us are paying the other 85%, so putting the 1.3 million into the pockets of those receiving the support, not only means tdc receives less but that tdc council tax payers have to pass on the rest to kcc et al. So not only money not collected but more paid out.
Though i stand to be corrected if this is not so. However there’s not been a single reply to the various comments i’ve made on the subject from anyone at tdc, whitehead, yates etc or any of the usually well informed posters who likely understand the system properly.
Avril my sentiments as well where is all the extra council tax going, if there are to be 9,000 more houses being built where are all the people going, Westwood is a nightmare as is all the traffic now and what about services ie hospitals doctors schools. I dread to think what is going to happen to our Thanet as we used to know it
Yet the council decided to spend an extra 1.2 million on additional council tax support to 6000 households on certain benefits meaning that in many cases no contribution is made whatsoever. The council even disregards upto 10,000 in savings.
Was that really a good use of council tax given the current issues with refuse collection?
This is a very good point. There are huge numbers of people claiming Council Tax help and the Labour Cabinet decided to generously increase the level so they don’t pay anything any more if they aren’t working on UC.
Over 12,000 households in Thanet get help with their Council Tax meaning the amount of cash they can raise overall from everyone else is much lower.
The new houses aren’t affordable by any stroke of a wand wave, so those new houses should be paying council tax so the council tax thing is a red herring, those houses are covered, it’s the 12k that are that are feeling this the most I’d bet, a lot of that is through disability/illness rather than laziness though from what I can see though, maybe 14% of that is potentially not paying anything
sure is a huge mess though, of course it could be landlords buying these affordable homes, but doesn’t make sense, a buy to let mortgage on a 360k house (which I believe is the starting price on these poorly specified homes) is going to be way more than the councilm will pay to house somebody so I’m pretty sure affordable homes are only affordable to two people working for say at least 45k pa a piece, so they pay their council tax.
Iirc recycle items that council taxpayers sort and pop into the bins for the council to collect. Recycle is scrap and has a monetary value. Depending on the contract they signed up to, it should be almost free for the council.
Recycling rate up at TDC, great, then less Landfill tax TDC needs to pay out.
Until the problems are properly sorted out, please revert to the previous system. Tbh that was not great either!
Funny there is always a magic wand for Thanet ‘art projects’ year after year-whether that is the Turner bleeding money or paying people to put awful looking graffiti all over Arlington & the litter bins along the seafront & a pointless 6.3 million digital centre-with no jobs available locally as no companies doing it are actually here at the end of it & no plans to have them come here, but they cannot find any to stop the streets becoming infested with rats & maggots.
Would also be nice to know how much TDC have wasted in legal costs on trying to close down local Premier Stores for supposed anti-social behaviour, with no evidence against them provided at court & their attempts to close down the Bong Shop rather than working with them.
Perhaps Mr Albon TDC could stop wasting money trying to destroy rate paying local businesses & stop funding vanity art projects for the wealthy, that do nothing but lose money & just do the basics like keeping the streets clean?
More houses = more Council Tax appears not to work. Perhaps no more house building in Thanet may be the answer.
Absolutely, john …. More houses , same number of binmen equals chaos. Thanet infrastructure is collapsing.
TDC thought the extra waste could be handled by the present work force and machines.
TDC say “Once we get the agency and sickness levels down there is automatically more available money within the service because it’s not being spent on cover.
So are TDC trying to pass the buck to the crews ?
Crews that must have seen their workload increas, overtime taken away we are lead to believe.
How are TDC going to get sickness levels down whilst increasing the staffs workloads ?
When staff are over worked and fatigued more accidents happen.
Honestly it baffles me why anyone would work for TDC
Seems a major failure by the waste management team & the directors. One assumes they are aware of the local plan and they communicate with the planners and building control.
Not to leave out the councillors who voted and approved a budget that was not fit for purpose.
Obviously time for the unitary authority and hope the management team will be up to the job.
Stop wasting money on new “social” housing, and look after the residents already here!
Here’s an idea, given it’s the developers who are making money from new housing, given the potholes in the roads are down to heavy construction traffic, why don’t they pay for added bin services and to relay the roads. it’s quite simple , you want planning, pay the CIL. I. fact where is all.yhe CIL being spent? KCC have a lot to answer for.
Agree get the magic wond out and use the millions from and funds cut the benefits for lazy kids who can get a job !!! Use CTax and some new staff to at lease clean up the litter up instead of residence doing there jobs
How much money was wasted on having the large metal bins, that nobody uses, painted by graffiti ‘artists’?
Their magic wand found £1.5m this year for extra pay rises for staff.