Last month, Cory Environmental announced that it had won a new seven-year refuse and recycling collection contract to start from September 1 for Lincoln.
 The city of Lincoln decided to go it alone over its new waste contract |
The new contract involves the delivery of wheeled bins to 40,000 households and alternate weekly collections will be introduced to outer city households. In the inner city area of Lincoln, waste will still be collected weekly and recyclables fortnightly.
Cllr Richard Metcalfe, leader of the city council, said: “The new service will entail a major new investment by the city council and will mean a very significant improvement in the quality of the service we offer to council taxpayers.”
Integrated
But, Lincoln had originally hoped that an integrated contract could have been let which would have seen it working with several neighbouring authorities. Ian Taylor, Lincoln's environmental promotions manager, who was involved in the Cory contract, has since a written a paper for the local government
IDEA Knowledge website explaining some of the challenges faced in drawing up integrated contracts.
Mr Taylor told letsrecycle.com that pensions were an important issue. “When you have direct labour organisations involved with some councils, you can find there are winners and losers in TUPE terms with regard to open and closed pension schemes.”
He added that different political views could also cause some difficulties.
In the paper Mr Taylor explains that in 2003 the Lincolnshire Waste Partnership identified a window of opportunity where all 7 district councils might be able to converge existing contracts or refuse collection arrangements into one single countywide contract to start in April 2006.
”It rapidly became clear that this was impractical for all the districts. “
– Ian Taylor, Lincoln city council
The paper notes that: “It rapidly became clear that this was impractical for all the districts, but 4 authorities agreed to form a working group to try and develop an integrated contract. Initial moves included involving the county council in the process, although it also became clear early on that the contract would not be a 'vertical integration' of collection and disposal but would only deal with refuse and recycling collections.”
Shropshire
It continues: “Visits were made by officers from the authorities to the Pathfinder Shropshire Waste Partnership, and to the ODPM Pathfinder team in London to try and learn from their experience.
“Eventually a formal partnership agreement was produced, with each District and the County agreeing to provide 25k per annum funding for a period of three years toward the costs of employing an Executive Officer and legal and technical consultancy support. One authority agreed to act as Authorised Body on behalf of the Partnership (now known as the 2006 Group) and all Group decisions were ratified by their Executive.”
DLOs
The paper then goes to explain some of the difficulties and the process followed.
On “The place of the DLO” it states that the position of the DLOs was discussed right at the beginning, “and it was agreed that no single authority was in a position to put together a bid for the whole contract.
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“Whilst the DLOs were obviously considered for TUPE transfer their position was never satisfactorily established once the authorities with DLOs agreed to prepare “shadow” bids for the DLO to deliver their service requirements. One of the shadow bids was less than the price submitted by the preferred tenderer, and then that authority was faced with the prospect of paying more for the service through the 2006 Group than would be the case with the DLO,” said the paper.
Mr Taylor told letsrecycle.com that he would be very willing to discuss the experience of the integrated contract work. “I think we have to acknowledge in local government that there can be problems sometimes and it is useful to talk about these as much as our successes.”
Contact: ian.taylor@lincoln.gov.uk
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