Rubbish service: Croydon Council wants to charge a £15 ‘admin fee’ when residents have to replace their wheelie bins – whether the council contractors have broken the bins or not
CROYDON IN CRISIS: New impacts of living in a bankrupt borough are emerging with every passing day. The latest is the ‘rationing’ of new wheelie bins for residents. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
£82k-£30k=…: Jason Perry, Croydon’s expensive but rubbish Mayor
Jason Perry, Croydon’s rubbish Mayor, plans to compound his 21% Council Tax increase over two years by a new “rationing” scheme for the borough’s wheelies, which from April will see residents charged £5 a time for new bins in an effort that will save the council… less than half the cost of his own annual Mayoral salary.
Perry is paid £82,000 per year for his role as the borough’s executive Mayor.
Among his latest wizard wheezes for dealing with Croydon’s £1.4billion toxic debt is an “admin fee” for handling residents’ requests for new bins, which he reckons will save the council a relatively piddling £30,000 per year.
How many refunds part-time Perry’s council might be forced to make for poor service has not been discussed publicly, which might be an oversight. The council’s own website confesses to a 12-week delay in providing replacement bins at present “due to the manufacturer experiencing an increase in demand following lockdown”. That’s the 2020 lockdown…
The reduction in provision of thousands of wheelie bins to Croydon residents each year has never been discussed in the Town Hall Chamber nor included in any council official’s report. “Given the existing back-log of orders, they probably don’t want to create a rush from residents trying to get replacement bins before the charges come in,” a Katharine Street source told Inside Croydon.
So we’ve sort of let Perry’s cat out of the bag. Whoops!
The council’s Labour opposition discovered Perry’s secret plan through a formal request to officials, who confirmed that since January 2024 there has been a “cap” of 2,500 new bins per month for the entire borough. This is down from around 4,000 bins per month, provided under a contract with Croydon’s rubbish contractors, Veolia.
Backlog: the council’s excuse for poor delivery of replacement bins dates back at least two years. Insiders say the real reason is ‘shit IT’ and ‘no real management of orders’
“The limit is 700 orders a week and 2,500 orders a month,” according to a written response, seen by Inside Croydon, from a junior council official.
“These numbers are in keeping with the service contract with the contractor.
“We do not currently charge for the replacement of bins; this will be reviewed once charging for this service is approved,” they said.
“This is service delivery to ensure we can provide the level of service to our residents. We were in receipt of over 4,000 orders a month which caused a backlog and complaints arising from residents for not meeting the expected delivery target.”
That’s the Croydon Council way: fail to meet demand, so cut back on the supply to compensate for what one Katharine Street source has described today as “a really shit IT system and no real management of orders”.
Nevertheless, 4,000 replacement bins required per month for a borough with around 150,000 households represent a higher rate than other local authorities, according to industry sources.
Under the contract with Veolia, to suit the contractors’ requirements and demands to help them drive down their costs of collecting residential waste and recycling, under a new deal in 2017 they undertook to replace all damaged or lost bins.
Under the £209million, eight-year agreement, new bins were rolled out across the borough, even to properties where it was neither appropriate nor necessary to have their 3ft 6in talls black plastic bins.
Whole neighbourhoods across Croydon, Sutton and Merton are now blighted by this “Binmageddon”, with pavements partly blocked off in areas where householders have no off-street storage area for the bins.
Binned: rubbish Veolia’s Croydon contract ends in 2025
Veolia have been sacked by Croydon and the three other councils in the South London Waste Partnership, following “significant and ongoing concerns” over their performance. This means that there is little or no incentive for Veolia’s management to exercise extra care over the way their staff manhandle residents’ bins between now and the end of their contract in 2025.
Typically, for a residential customer buying a 240-litre bin retail, they might expect it to cost £50 each.
But Perry’s council is not going to be charging the price of new bins.
The new £5 fee will be for “administration”, the cost of hiring staff and processing a few online forms. The charge is expected to be levied on small food waste bins as well as the larger waste and recycling wheelie bins. “I expect it will cost more to recover the fee than the charge itself,” our source said.
It might be a cheeky little earner for Perry, Croydon’s very own Del Boy parody: £5 a time for 30,000 replacement bins over a year could bring in £150,000 for the cash-strapped council. Oi! Oi!
The Labour group at Croydon Town Hall says that the £5 charge would often be unfair on residents. “Given that many requests [for replacement bins] are made because the council’s own contractor damages residents’ bins,” Croydon Labour tweeted, “how Croydon Tories can justify this decision is baffling.
“Presumably, that’s why the decision was taken in secret.”
Yet again, under Mayor Perry and council chief exec Katherine Kerswell, the residents of Croydon are paying more and getting less. Much less…
Read more: Croydon and three other boroughs to bin Veolia rubbish deal
Read more: Binmageddon: Veolia provides consistently rubbish service
Read more: Binmageddon: Veolia are ‘failing’ says ex-council leader
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