Our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE, on Tory Mayor Perry’s multi-million-pound practical joke being played on residents tomorrow in a borough which can’t say which day a street’s bins are due to be emptied, and where the rubbish contractor is getting their excuses in early
Meet the new rubbish contractors, same as the old rubbish contractors: Veolia’s new eight-year, £40m deal begins tomorrow
Note the date of publication of this report. And be ready for what awaits the whole of Croydon tomorrow.
Croydon Council is playing the biggest April Fool’s joke on the public it is supposed to serve tomorrow: they begin a “new”, £40million, eight-year contract with rubbish contractors Veolia.
That’s the same firm they sacked for incompetence less than two year ago.
The Conservative-controlled council is describing its latest deal with Veolia as an “upgraded waste contract”. In reality, the only thing truly upgraded is the amount being paid to Veolia.
The council even issued a press release in which they quoted the sacked contractor’s managing director, Pascal Hauret, saying how “thrilled” he is to be given the opportunity for “building on the successes of the previous eight years”.
Those “successes” for Veolia included persuading gullible councillors to allow them to remove 1,000 public waste bins from the borough’s streets, to give their workers fewer bins to empty, making the contractors’ job quicker, and cheaper.
As for the “enhanced” services under the new contract promised by Veolia, they will now be sweeping the borough’s streets. Following the re-tendering, it emerged that under the previous deal, Veolia was only obliged to sweep the streets of the various district centres.
Mixed messages: council and Veolia leaflets have been delivered late and with conflicting information
Residential streets in the suburbs only got a visit from a bloke with a broom and a dustcart if enough people complained.
And after years of poor service and neglect, by Veolia and their paymasters at the council, most people have come to accept litter-strewn, bin-less streets as the norm, so they hardly ever bother to use the council’s Crap App to log the need for a bit of a sweep. Which is a bit of a problem with a “response-led” system of prioritising which streets need sweeping.
But that’s been… ahem… swept away by the new contract that comes in tomorrow. There ought to be more evidence of streets actually being swept under this renewed street cleaning contract.
Yet even as their eight-year contract kicks in, Veolia are making sure that they get their excuses in early.
Today, according to the council’s website (which, we grant you, may not be an entirely reliable source of truthful information as far as Croydon Council is concerned), Veolia are already missing bin collections (again).
Now, the rubbish contractors are blaming a driver shortage – one of their old favourites from The Veolia Book of Lame Excuses.
Under a headline “Driver shortage impacts waste and recycling collections”, the council apologises on behalf of their contractor, “Collections of recycling and general waste continue to be impacted by staff shortages in the London labour market with a particular impact on HGV drivers needed to deliver vital waste and recycling collection services.”
Note the use of “continue” in that sentence. An admission that this is nothing new.
More excuses: Croydon Council is already making excuses for its rubbish contractor
Of course, having landed a £40million contract, Veolia might reasonably be expected to go out and recruit enough staff to fulfil their side of the bargain with Croydon. That might even mean offering more competitive wages to recruit the qualified HGV drivers needed “to deliver vital waste and recycling collection services” and overcome this supposed labour shortage.
It might be worth reminding ourselves that London has the highest unemployment rate in the country, with 6.1% of adults not working, well above the UK average unemployment rate of 4.4%. Perhaps someone should tell Veolia, and Croydon Council.
Veolia, though, appear to prefer to fob off the public with excuses, while officials working at Mayor Jason Perry’s council stand back and allow their contractor to breach the terms of their contract. Just like Veolia used to do before they got sacked.
“Veolia continues to recruit and train employees to deliver services,” the council website says, taking Croydon residents for fools. “Despite this, some collections are taking place later than scheduled.
“If your collection is missed, please leave your bins out and we will get to you as soon as possible.”
Another old faithful from The Veolia Book of Lame Excuses is to blame the customer: Veolia’s managers might claim that residents had not left their bins out. Or that they didn’t leave their bins in the right place. Who is this service contract supposed to be benefiting? Residents or Veolia?? Croydon Council has never acted as if they are on their residents’ side.
Another way that Veolia likes to pull a fast one is to change the days when a bin lorry collection is due to take place. In some parts of the borough, this has occurred this week – so it is either under the old contract, or it might be a switch in advance of the new contract. Not even Veolia, or the terminally shambolic Croydon Council, appear to be clear on this one.
As one loyal Inside Croydon reader has written today: “So we received zero days’ notice from Croydon Council that our bin collection day was changing, from tomorrow to… today!
“Two letters shoved through the letterbox this morning contain conflicting dates as to when our regular collection day will change. One states it will change ‘From Monday 31 March’, so too late to actually put anything out for collection.
“The other letter states ‘From 1st April’, so tomorrow. Will we get a collection on that day of the week or not?
“It’s all very confusing and smacks of incompetence from Croydon Council and Veolia.
“Collection lorries have been out in the street today, but of course most people haven’t put anything out for collection, so we will likely have our waste sitting in our bins for another two weeks now.”
The council says that under its new deal, they are actually going to monitor Veolia’s performance. Previously, the contractor was allowed to mark their own homework, with inevitable consequences.
The new contract, presented by Mayor Perry as some kind of triumph for his cash-strapped council, will see Veolia paid at least £2.5million per year more than they were being paid when they got sacked.
Dirty deed: how the council website confirmed the deal, with ‘partner’ Veolia, last year
In 2022, Croydon issued a Service Improvement Notice to Veolia expressing “significant and ongoing concerns” over the poor service. Rather than kick Veolia out there and then, it was announced that the contract would run down until it ended in March 2025.
Sutton and Merton, neighbouring boroughs and co-members of the South London Waste Partnership, went through a similarly expensive and pointless exercise. Under Sutton’s hapless chief exec Helen Bailey, they spent £500,000 conducting a procurement exercise before… re-appointing discredited Veolia.
This is the same Veolia whose services saw the Metro newspaper name Croydon as having “the filthiest streets in London”, with almost 32,000 household bin collections being missed in 2023.
And with the increase coming in April, residents in Croydon will have seen their Council Tax increase by 27% since 2023 under Mayor Perry, bringing a Band D property to £2480.48, the second-highest in London.
And yet Mayor Perry can’t even guarantee that you’ll get your bins emptied or your street swept.
Read more: Two-year search to replace Veolia hands £40m deal to… Veolia
Read more: BINMAGEDDON: Mayor’s secret plan to charge £5 per new bin
Read more: Croydon and three other boroughs to bin Veolia rubbish deal
- Inside Croydon has moved to Bluesky. Click here to join us there for latest updates and insights
Check out our archive of podcasts on Spotify, including our monthly news discussion panel show thingy, the Croydon Insider, and The Andrew Fisher Interview
The Croydon Advertiser sold an average of just 742 copies per week last year (ABC 2024 audit).
Inside Croydon is read by an average of 10,000 people every weekday
TO ADVERTISE your services, products or event to our readers to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
If there’s a shortage of HGV drivers for the Croydon contract, nobody has told the people who run Veolia’s jobs page, where there is an ad for a HGV Technician to keep their trucks on the road, and a “Social Value Officer”.
But if you try and find a HGV Driver and tick the Croydon box on Veolia’s webshite, you’ll draw a blank.
A search for people in Bernard Weatherill House who don’t believe everything they’re told and you’ll be on a similarly fruitless exercise.
In Coulsdon, Croydon council schedule has changed on its website so it now doesn’t match what has been collected each week for the year so far, and now the website says bins not collected as the wrong bins left out. I Have CCTV to prove what they’ve previously collected.
Our rubbish collection has already been rubbish in 2025 (calendar year) from the predictably unreliable Veolia, and it sounds like it might get worse in the new Council financial year !?!
We used to have a consistent collection of some rubbish on Wednesdays in 2023 and 2024, but from Jan 2025, they switched (without any warning) to collect from our 10 (small) blocks of flats on Tuesdays, but return to do the individual properties on Wednesdays (in Jan and Feb). That wasn’t so bad for the blocks because they emptied the general rubbish bins every week instead of every fortnight, although they still only empty our recycling bins approx. twice a year. But that all changed again in early March when, again without warning, they moved the whole estate back to Wednesday collections, and returned to only emptying our general rubbish bins fortnightly….
Where do Veolia take Croydon’s rubbish to?
I used to believe that the contents of the food waste bin was composted to make Croypost, that recycling was actually recycled, and that general rubbish no longer went to landfill but was sent to the fume-belching incinerator in Beddington.
But I have heard that they no longer make Croypost, and I think that recycling bins are just to make us peasants believe we are doing the right thing by recycling, but all rubbish from all bins in Croydon (even if they do collect them separately) goes to feed the voracious Beddington incinerator ?!
It is also cheaper, for Veolia
They may collect the rubbish from the different bins separately to make us peasants think that they are treating the rubbish types differently(?) But it is cheaper for Veolia to collect all the rubbish at the same time to avoid making several visits to each address, so perhaps they will start doing that from tomorrow, with their even more lucrative contract that the clueless idiots at Croydon Council have just awarded them?
Friday night, 9.30pm. And they have just come with the dust cart, and emptied our Rubbish.. Great work!
Perhaps it’s cheaper at that time?