Central government is urging all parts of the public sector to do more for less to offset the impact of reduced spending. In reality of course for most types of service, smaller budgets will mean reduced services.
For local authority waste collection services however, our experience at Eunomia suggests the squeeze on spending may drive out real savings, without cutting quality. So why is this service any different? And where are the savings?
There are savings to be made, partly because our industry has changed out of all recognition over the past decade and because the changes weve seen havent had time to bed in. Theres been a revolution in the management of household waste with recycling rates quadrupling between 2000 and 2010 from 10% to 40%. But our success has been built on fairly shallow foundations: in 2000 we had very little experience nationally speaking as to how to best set up and run the recycling services which are today ubiquitous.
Clearly a huge amount has been learned over the last 10 years but, critically, weve still not had time to share all those lessons. When people, whether officers or contractors, change jobs or move to a different depot they take what theyve learned with them. But these moves tend to be relatively infrequent and local so when one authority finds a clever way to deal with a problem, it can be a long time before others find out about it. And where services are contracted out there are long intervals between re-tenders so the opportunity to make savings doesnt come round often.
So whilst we find examples of good practice in every authority we work with equally there tend to be things that we find that could be improved.
Theres also scope to make savings because local authorities havent needed to focus as hard as they do now on managing collection service costs. Landfill diversion and the need to meet challenging recycling targets have been urgent priorities. So its hardly surprising that local authorities havent yet fully optimised their services for cost.
Opportunities
Now that local authorities are having to work through the first major period of budgetary retrenchment since recycling and composting collection services were first introduced there are opportunities to both share the lessons between authorities and to fine-tune services to reduce their cost.
In our report back in December 2010 Cutting Waste: Reducing Costs and Improving Waste and Recycling Services we described how better procurements, more efficient services and voluntary partnerships are already bringing down costs and improving services in many parts of the country. By applying these lessons across the country, English local authorities have the potential to maintain services while releasing annual savings of over 770 million.
Weve summarised whats being done in a new report, 10 Ways to Cut the Costs of Local Authority Waste Collection which well be handing out free to local authority officers and members at the RWM/CIWM conference. This discusses the types of savings that can be made through:
Increased productivity. That can be as simple as making sure that crewing levels match the density of the population being served on a given round, or it can be more complicated and require revisions to terms and conditions. One authority weve worked with had staff contracted to work fixed hours for a four day week. But, because of the location of the tips, staff were working as if they were on task and finish and going home early. They were then being paid overtime to come in and finish the work on the fifth day. Effectively the authority was paying 45 hours for 37 hours of work.
Getting the most from your contractor. Thats partly about good procurement, and were seeing a number of contracts where service costs are falling, but its also possible to revisit a contract mid-term. Cotswold District Council made huge savings by renegotiating with their collection contractor, all without cutting the quality of the service that residents receive.
Making the most of potential scale economies, either by working in partnership across the whole service or more simply by jointly procuring certain items or sharing depots with neighbours. Quite often the big projects are considered too hard, but increasingly authorities are finding really big savings by successfully tackling these complicated projects.
Getting charged services into shape. Fair charges for bulky waste collections can make a small contribution to overall service costs but the big wins come where its possible to introduce garden waste charges or where the commercial waste service hasnt yet tapped its full potential. When youre driving past every household every week, its cheap to collect trade waste as well but frequently this competitive advantage is overlooked. A good trade waste and recycling collection service can be worth 100k / annum, so its definitely worth investing in.
Local government waste officers rose to the challenge of massively increasing recycling rates. Now faced with the need to drive down these services costs, they have the chance to help protect other key services where there is less scope to make pain-free savings.
If youre not going to be at the conference next week and would like a copy of the report, please contact us via our website at www.eunomia.co.uk.
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