The Urbaser waste contract - What's going on?

19 October 2021

The multiple failures of the Urbaser waste contract, the appalling state of our litter-strewn streets and the failure to extend doorstep recycling to flats had been the subject of concern from our MPs, Tom Tugendhat and Tracey Crouch, who wrote to the then Borough Council Leader, Nicolas Heslop, back in June. Since then, the service has worsened and we have endured the suspension of our garden waste collection too. So why are our parliamentarians no longer speaking up on behalf of their residents? Maybe because our new Council Leader, Cllr Matt Boughton, is a member of Tom’s office staff?

Surely not?

Maybe because, after a decade of cuts to the Government's funding, Tonbridge and Malling the Borough Council was forced to gamble on a cut-price contract that would allow it to cash in to the tune of £1 million a year by introducing a charge for a separate garden waste collection, effectively a Garden Tax.This, despite horror stories from other councils around the country who have been using Urbaser, regarding their poor service. However, the gamble hasn’t paid off and it has emerged that the penalty system that is supposed to force Urbaser to comply with the strict terms of its contract is essentially worthless as the size of the penalties are inconsequential given the size of the payments made to the multinational company.

The Council has insufficient tools to force Urbaser to comply through the terms of its contract. It appears due diligence has not been undertaken to anticipate the problems, which have neccessited more vehicles being brought in and a failure of management that has seen the contractor lose many employees, which it is struggling to replace.So why go for the cheapest option knowing the problems elsewhere and why weren’t sufficient penalties written into the contract? Where has the Cabinet Member responsible been since taking over the waste portfolio and what is going to happen next? Is the Council going to consider setting up its own waste company to take over?

A one-off collection of garden waste is not going to carry off the financial implications of Urbaser’s ongoing failures.

We now know that in addition to facing a £2m budget gap for 2022/23 the Council is losing £42,000 every time a garden waste collection remains uncollected in lost revenue. The budget gap is essentially due to MPs like Tom and Tracey voting to cut funding for councils like ours in every year that they have sat in Parliament, resulting in Tonbridge and Malling receiving less Government assistance than any other district in Kent.

We have all heard about the national HGV driver shortage, but nobody mentioned that six months ago when Covid was still being blamed. And we also had enough drivers before the pandemic.

Green Councillors have forced the Council to give us a weekly briefing every Friday but we are still waiting to see the monthly key performance indicators (KPIs) at the end of each month as requested. We have been told that the KPIs will be presented to the meetings of the Street Scene and Environmental Services Advisory Board, which sometimes only meet three times a year. This is not good enough and we continue to ask for more regular meetings of that Board as well as for the publication of the KPIs on a monthly basis so that Councillors and residents can monitor the progress, or otherwise, of the most essential service provided by our Council. We need to see a marked improvement and soon.