Councillor Steve Munby, cabinet member for Neighbourhoods, said that by outsourcing their waste and recycling services to the private sector, local authorities were putting collections in the hands of ‘cartels’.
His comments came as Liverpool city council acquired the remaining shares of its prior joint venture with Amey last week to form its own Local Authority Trading Company (LATCO). The handover was finalised on Friday.
The council has now taken out a 10-year lease on the former venture’s waste depot in Old Swan. It has also taken control of six trade waste vehicles, 36 bin wagons, and suspended the procurement exercise to identify a new service provider for waste collections in Liverpool, which had been ongoing since January 2015.
GMB
Speaking to letsrecycle.com, Mr Munby said the handover had been welcomed by GMB trade union members, with refuse collectors in the city to begin rounds half an hour earlier under the agreement.
Pay disputes had previously erupted during the union’s occasionally rocky relationship with Enterprise Liverpool (see letsrecycle.com story).
He added that at a pre-mobilisation meeting on Thursday, councillors had debated suspending garden waste collections for a period in order to use the vehicles for other types of collection.
Mr Munby commented that now services were in-house, the council would look at the need to introduce food waste collections in the city and continue with ‘a number of pilots’.
These include rolling out blue sacks for refuse at terraced houses where collections have been scaled back from weekly to fortnightly. The council is also talking to managing agents and landlords to ensure recycling provisions are installed in blocks of flats in the city centre.
Mr Munby added that reducing residual waste frequency was ‘easier to do’ under the new arrangement because there is more flexibility.
He said: “There was a mood to outsource a lot of public services in the late 80s that worked on the assumption that it brought in capital investment and introduced competition.
“These are monopoly services so the idea it increases competition is ridiculous. What we have is a number of waste companies acting as cartels that are bearing extra costs. They are not bringing a service they are charging a rent.”
Politics
The move in-house has not been universally welcomed. Speaking on the North West edition of the BBC Sunday Politics show yesterday, Liverpool Lib Dem councillor Richard Kemp said he had ‘tempered it for now’ but remained sceptical of the benefits.
Paul O’Brien, chief executive for the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE), argued that the lack of central government funding meant councils have been left with little option. He added that “it’s getting to the point the public will see the difference in the level of service they will receive.”
But also appearing on the show, Conservative South Ribble MP Seema Kennedy highlighted her council’s decision to outsource its collections to FCC earlier this year “for £500,000” with no change to the quality of service. She said: “It’s not about funding, it’s about how efficient you can be.”
The report is available here.
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