The waste and resources business is first choice to deliver the contract, which has been tendered by the South London Waste Partnership (SLWP) and covers the London boroughs of Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton and Sutton for an initial period of eight years.
The contract also involves a separate lot for street cleaning and parks maintenance services, which is due to be delivered by The Landscape Group.
SWLP’s 18-month procurement exercise will be reviewed by the four councils and by its Joint Waste Committee on 7 June – where it will be asked to endorse the recommendations.
Launched in 2014, the procurement hopes to address the £40 million funding gap from central government projected across the authorities by 2018/19.
Over the course of the procurement, Veolia fended off competition from Kier, Serco, Amey and Biffa – with the latter two companies reaching the final stage of the tender (see letsrecycle.com story).
The four-borough collection service proposed by Veolia will mirror the service the company already operates in Kingston and Croydon. [Update: 31/05/16]: It will also be identical to the collections carried out in Bromley and Brent, according to SWLP.
This would include a separate weekly food waste collection, alternate weekly collections of twin-stream dry recyclables, with paper and card collected one week and tins, plastics and glass the next, and a fortnightly collection for refuse.
Kingston switched from weekly to fortnightly recycling collections in February in a move which is expected to save the council £4.2 million over the next seven years (see letsrecycle.com story).
Flexible
Flexibility in the new contract also means the four boroughs have the ability to specify different start dates for different elements of the work.
If contracts are awarded, the proposed timetable would see the new recycling and waste collection service roll out across Sutton in April 2017, Croydon and Merton in October 2018 and Kingston in 2022. The deal has an eight-year extension option, bringing the potential lifetime of Veolia’s arrangement to 16 years.
Commenting on today’s announcement councillor Stuart Collins, chair of the SLWP Joint Committee, said that the four boroughs will spend a combined £38 million on delivering waste collection, street cleaning, winter gritting, parks and cemeteries maintenance services this year.
He said: “We identified that by working together and harmonising services across the region we could all make significant savings and deliver high quality services that local people value.
“When you look at the very substantial savings we can achieve – many tens of millions of pounds over the next eight years – set against the incredibly difficult decisions we are all having to make about which services to reduce or stop providing all together, I believe that most local people will agree that making these changes is the right thing to do.
“Local residents can rest assured that they will receive environmental services of the very highest quality, but at a greatly reduced cost to the public purse.”
Viridor
Dry recyclables will meanwhile continue to be processed at Viridor’s materials recycling facility (MRF) in Crayford. However, Mr Collins has previously suggested that this too may be open to future reappraisal depending on any contamination issues that arise from an integrated system.
Viridor is the chosen contractor to operate the £205 million energy recovery facility in Beddington, which is on course to treat all 300,000 tonnes of residual waste arisings from across the SLWP from 2018 (see letsrecycle.com story).
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