Councillor Alastair Gunn, Harlow Council’s new cabinet portfolio holder for environment, met with Veolia’s senior management team yesterday (1 June 2021) to discuss the issues that residents have faced in the last six weeks with disruption to bin collections.
The meeting followed Councillor Gunn’s pledge on 21 May 2021 to sort out the town’s bin collections. At yesterday’s meeting Veolia committed to putting additional vehicle and staffing resources into the Harlow contract within the next week to ensure that collections are undertaken on time.
Veolia and the council have also discussed implementing some longer term changes to help with the delivery of waste and recycling collections. The growth of new housing, particularly in the east of the town, has meant that there is a greater workload on some days than others due to the number of properties needing collections. A new schedule will be introduced to balance the collections throughout the week to avoid the disruptions that have mainly happened to residents’ collections on Mondays and Tuesdays. The details of this are being developed. The council will be able to inform residents of any changes from the end of next week, with any changes coming in several weeks later to give residents affected time to prepare.
Councillor Alastair Gunn, portfolio holder for environment, said:
“Veolia’s recent and ongoing performance failures are not acceptable and I welcomed the opportunity to discuss how they plan to rectify this, in detail. Veolia will provide additional resource to Harlow to ensure residents do not experience further disruption, which is encouraging. I am committed to working with Veolia to ensure service standards return to and remain at an acceptable standard.”