According to documents sent to members on February 5 2010, the savings on the 20-year deal with Veolia stem from the MWDA signing the contract it let in May 2009 at a “more favourable” rate than it had previously budgeted for.
The deal, which is worth £640 million, sees the French-owned firm operate 16 household waste recycling centres on Merseyside, plus its materials recycling facility at Bidston (see letsrecycle.com story).
The MWDA explained that the impact of the savings would be felt in the budget both for the remainder of the 2009/10 financial year, where “a significant underspend is anticipated”, and also in the future where the underlying cost of the contract is “less than anticipated”.
Commenting on the savings, Carl Beer, MWDA director, said: “This is great news for Merseyside. The whole of the public sector is feeling the pinch but we managed to negotiate a great deal on one of our single biggest items of spending – the new Waste Management and Recycling Contract – and it means we can avoid having to pass on hefty increases to the local councils.”
A spokeswoman for the MWDA explained that a decline in waste arisings in the region had been a factor in the Authority securing a lower contractual rate with Veolia.
Levy
Following the review of the costs of the contract, the MWDA said the average levy for waste disposal and recycling placed on the members of the Authority for the 2010/11 financial year would now be 0%.
The freeze in the levy comes after two successive years of increases on Merseyside, with the waste disposal and recycling levy rising by 12% for 2009/10, having already increased by 15.4% for 2008/09.
In a breakdown of the impact of the levy on the Merseyside local authorities in the MWDA, it was noted that all except Liverpool would still incur an increase but not on a par with previous years.
Knowsley metropolitan borough council's levy for 2010/11 will rise by 3.7% from its 2009/10 rate to £8.026 million, and Wirral metropolitan council's levy rises by 3.4% to £17.04 million for the financial year.
The levy will also increase for St Helens metropolitan borough council by 0.2% to now be £9.02 million, while Sefton metropolitan borough council will also have a small increase of 1.3% to £12.974 million.
Meanwhile, Liverpool city council looks set to receive a 4.2% decrease in its levy, with the cost of waste disposal falling to £23.799 million.
Chairman of the authority, councillor Kevin Cluskey, said: “Councils which face an increased levy are still benefitting – without the savings we've achieved, the increase they face would have been very much bigger.”
Halton borough council is represented by the MWDA under an inter-authority agreement, however, as a unitary authority it is responsible for the collection and disposal of its own municipal waste and therefore not subject to the waste disposal levy.
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