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Denbighshire faces backlash as bin collection failures persist despite extra spending

Denbighshire County Council

TWO residents have claimed they’ve not had their bins collected on time since Denbighshire Council brought in a new recycling scheme in early June.

The council brought in a new Trolibocs service in June and required residents to separate recycling themselves into separate compartments.

Recycling collections were increased from fortnightly to weekly whilst bins were scaled back to a monthly collection service.

The council was bombarded with reports of missed collections as the botched scheme was rolled out.

The council launched revised collection rounds this week in a bid to bring the situation under control, but two residents have now stepped forward claiming they’ve never had a scheduled collection on time since the old scheme was scrapped.

The waste service was £640,000 over budget before the council agreed to spend an additional £1.067m to try and fix the service.

David Thompson, who lives in the hills above Rhuallt, claims he has only had one collection in five months, having escorted the recycling operatives to his home address.

Mr Thompson claims he has been forced to drive to the recycling centre himself every week.

“I caught the binmen at the top of the lane,” he said.

“They didn’t know we were here basically. That was probably four or five weeks ago.

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“I directed them to where we were.

“They said they would pass the information on to the non-recycling crew, and I haven’t seen them since.

“All the emails and phone calls to Denbighshire County Council have just been a waste of time. They won’t give me any information on who else I can speak to.

“I’m making multiple trips to the recycling centre at my own cost. I’m disgusted with the whole thing.

“Denbighshire, as a council, I can’t get any sense out of it. I’ve had no calls back, no emails, nothing. It’s frustrating. My neighbours have got the same problem.”

Catriona Cunnah, who lives on a family farm near Dyserth with her husband, Richard, was in a similar situation.

“The bins were fine, but since we had the new service, they just haven’t been emptied,” she said.

“I’ve never had my recycling done, and we’ve had to ring every single time for them to come up and empty them.

“Since May, they’ve never been to collect them (on schedule). We’ve had to ring, and we’ve only had them emptied three times in that time.

“We’ve rang and rang and rang and emailed. They’ve then turned up with the bin wagon, and all the recycling has gone in that, so they are just not doing it.”

She added: “They want us to recycle, and they just come up and chuck it all in one. We are getting rats.”

Tremeirchion Councillor Chris Evans also slammed the council.

“Denbighshire residents are paying for a service, and it’s not fair after five months, they are still not getting bin collections,” he said.

“Denbighshire has received 500 formal complaints and 12,000 reports of uncollected bins. That’s not good enough.

“The council has invested £22m – some has come from Welsh Government – but it is still ratepayers’ money. In my mind the Labour-led council should have stopped this until we were in a better financial position to roll this system out.”

He added: “They’ve spent over £1m to try and resolve this, haemorrhaging between £55-£60,000 a week. Imagine what that could do for our social care, our libraries, our toilets.”

A spokesman for Denbighshire County Council said: “We have been in contact with Cllr Evans regarding this topic and are currently looking into these specific missed collection claims.

“The cabinet has recently approved a proposal to invest additional resources into the service, which will provide the permanent solution to the issues we’ve seen with recycling collections since the new system was introduced in June.

“Although the vast majority of residents across the county are now receiving the expected level of service, with a weekly recycling collection, we do accept that we still have some issues with specific properties that are not getting a consistent service.

“We do appreciate how frustrating that is for those residents, and we are working hard to resolve those remaining issues.”

The council spokesman claimed Cllr Evans’ figure of a £55-£60,000 weekly overspend, which had been cited at several council meetings by councillors in recent months, was inaccurate.

In late September Denbighshire’s cabinet admitted it had then run over budget by £640,000 since the scheme was introduced on June 3, which would then equate to an overspend of approximately £40,000 a week at that time.

This was before Denbighshire Council’s cabinet agreed in September to borrow £1.299m in capital expenditure to buy eight new vehicles as well as spending an extra £1.067m a year to try and fix the issue.

But the spokesman added: “This figure of c.£60k per week has been quoted in the past, but it is incorrect.

“The projected additional cost for the whole of the 24/25 financial year is c.£1.2m. That is being covered by a one-off receipt of £1.2m from another waste related project – the North Wales Residual Waste Treatment Partnership.

“There was already a revenue pressure on the waste service before this service change was made. Therefore the waste service was already over budget.

“The budget for the waste service in 2023/24 was c.£7.2m, but the cost of the waste service in 2023/24 was c.£8m, which is an overspend of c. £800k.”

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