Council Waste Contract Scrutiny Underway

Councillors have held the first meeting of the working group that will be looking at the roll out of the new waste and street cleansing contract.

The scrutiny review will be examining Swale Borough Council’s new waste contract with Suez, that started in March, following several months of disruption for many residents.

The Council has confirmed that they will be looking at a range of issues around the start of the new contract, including:

• resources and staffing
• data and rounds
• contract and project management
• communications

It's understood that the group will spend the next couple of months carrying out detailed investigations into these topics, using a range of methods to get information and feedback, including:

• workshops with council officers and Suez representatives
• consultation with area committees and the Parish Forum
• a public survey to ask for people’s experiences with the new contract

Cllr Rich Lehmann, chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee at Swale Borough Council, who is also chairing the review, told SFM News: “We know the start of this contract has not gone well. We want to hold a detailed investigation into what happened, what went wrong, and how we can improve. Councillors from all political groups will be taking part in the review, and this first meeting was a constructive start to what I think will be a valuable process.

Cllr Lehmann went on to add: We’ve agreed the approach we’ll take and fleshed out the issues we’ll be looking at, and now we will begin the work to carry out a thorough review of how the contract has begun. A key part of this will be hearing from local voices with their experiences of the service over the past few months, and we’ll be launching a survey soon to help gather these views. Ultimately, we all want the service to be running as well as it can, and this review is a chance to make sure we learn from any mistakes so we can work together to make it a success.”

The review was agreed by the council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee at a meeting last month (July 2024).

The committee nominated the following councillors to carry out the review:

• Councillor Rich Lehmann - Boughton and Courtenay (Green Party)
• Councillor Dolley Wooster - Sheerness (Labour Party)
• Councillor Julien Speed - Teynham and Lynsted (Conservative Party)
• Councillor Chris Palmer - Hartlip, Newington and Upchurch (Swale Independents)
• Councillor Hannah Perkin - Abbey (Liberal Democrats)

The group will present a report back to the Environment And Climate Change Committee at an extraordinary committee meeting on Wednesday 20th November.