In a report released this week, the Audit Commission described how the council's improvement plan did not clearly identify the resources needed to achieve its goals, but a committee approved it anyway. Only later did the council, working with district councils through the Wiltshire Waste Partnership (WWP), agree to make a bid for the necessary funds.
Uncertain
In addition, the council did not know whether it had met its recycling targets because of gaps in figures, the report said. “In the last two years, the council has not been able to return audited figures for some performance indicators, including recycling,” inspectors explained. “It is therefore uncertain if it has met its own recycling targets.”
Despite these mistakes, commissioners awarded the council's waste management service two out of a possible three stars and said that despite problems, the authority had promising prospects for improvement. They also praised the council for keeping its waste management costs down and said that compared to other councils, its contractor had “significantly improved” recycling over the past five years.
Opportunities
After inspections in August 2001 and March 2002, the Commission said that the county offered good opportunities to recycle and plans to increase the number and accessibility of civic amenity sites. Communication with customers had improved thanks to a new website and a proper complaints system had been started on the inspectors' advice, it added.
But the inspectors had several criticisms: there was limited community involvement in setting service aims and targets, they said, and customer satisfaction with civic amenity sites was low.
Failed
Plus, the council “failed to specify a contract requirement to achieve the intended 25% target and the contractor failed to meet the resultant 20% target for July 2001,” the inspectors' report said.
But the inspectors praised the WWP, which had built a strong relationship with district councils and pooled targets, attracting extra government funding. They also liked the improvement plan which set “challenging targets that reflect national waste strategy objectives for recycling and waste minimisation.”
Wiltshire County Council's area includes 433,000 residents (excluding Swindon unitary authority) and the district councils have a municipal waste disposal budget of 8.2 million for 2002/03.
Waste disposal in Kennet, north Wiltshire and Salisbury is managed by Hills Waste, while Viridor Waste Management disposes of waste in West Wiltshire. Recycling in all the districts is carried out by Hills.
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