#BINMAGEDDON: After five years of community campaigning, and following repeated broken promises from Fisher’s Folly, now the council says it has no idea where around 1,000 street bins have gone.
By our Town Hall correspondent, SANDRA STEAD
Rubbish service: the council spent £1.2m in 2016 on 88 Big Belly Bins, which have proved to be an expensive stunt that never really worked
“Totally inaccurate nonsense”.
A volunteer campaigner has criticised the data provided by Croydon Council in a Freedom of Information response supposedly providing the positioning of litter bins in the borough.
According to Tony Hooker, of the community group Litter Free Norbury, of 33 litter bin locations in his area that were provided by Croydon Council in response to the FoI, in 26 cases, there is no bin present.
That’s a 78% fail rate by our council. Or what Hooker called: “Totally inaccurate nonsense”.
Inside Croydon has reported before how the provision, or lack of provision, of litter bins on the borough’s streets has been a significant factor in our pavements and roads becoming increasingly strewn with litter.
In 2021, aided by official council figures provided in FoIs submitted by Hooker, we reported how 1,000 bins had been removed from Croydon’s streets since 2018.
Since then, requests to the council for information, an asset audit and an explanation for the vanishing bins, all went with only limited response. And now a senior executive at the council has admitted that promises, in 2023, to conduct an audit of the borough’s bins has all been binned – because council staff are too busy getting to grips with the latest waste deal with the borough’s rubbish contractors, Veolia.
It was Hooker’s painstaking research that discovered that, in his own neighbourhood between 2016 and 2020, every standard litter bin had mysteriously disappeared (the council offered no explanation), and that the area, including the half-mile stretch of Norbury high street, was now served by just five Big Belly Bins.
“This was a completely inadequate bin infrastructure,” Hooker said.
Bin deal: Veolia were sacked by Mayor Jason Perry in 2023 for poor performance, and they started a multi-million-pound eight-year contract in 2025
At the time, Croydon Council tried to claim that it had nothing to do with bins being removed. Nothing was done to have the bins replaced, either, even though it was within the existing deal with Veolia to do so.
Of course, the disappearance of 1,000 or more street bins was all done to reduce the amount of bin-emptying work done by Veolia.
A total of 88 solar-powered Big Belly Bins were installed around the borough in 2016 to 2017, “part of a £1.28million investment to keep streets cleaner and tidier”, according to an announcement at the time by Stuart Collins, the then Labour-run council’s cabinet member for streets and environment.
“The new bins compress waste allowing for a larger capacity and improved resources elsewhere,” Collins claimed at the time.
Collins proved to be just another Croydon mugging. This was just another expensive outlay by our council to reduce the work, and costs, of Veolia.
Croydon mugging: Stuart Collins accepted Veolia’s arguments in favour of Big Belly Bins
No one at the council had considered the obvious: that the technology might not always be reliable. The Big Belly Bins quickly proved to be an unreliable million-pound gamble. The council has since binned off the contract it had with a company that was supposed to maintain the borough-wide big belly bins in working order. Now, none of them work.
In 2020, Croydon gave Veolia a £22million contract “uplift” in order to improve the service provided.
There was no noticeable improvement.
In 2023, the council, now under Tory Mayor Jason Perry, sacked Veolia for a series of failures to deliver on their contract.
In 2025, Mayor Jason Perry’s entered into a new, eight-year contract worth £40million with… Veolia.
The result has been entirely predictable.
Getting hold of the metrics of Veolia’s new contract have proved impossible. But one measurable indicator of performance is out there on our streets: litter bins.
And Litter Free Norbury’s Hooker has found that several of the bins which managed to be reinstated or installed as a result of his campaigning since 2020 are now missing.
“Frankly, the council should be embarrassed at how bad this is,” Hooker said.
Aside from the £1.28million wasted on the Big Belly Bins, Hooker estimates that at least £250,000 of council assets were allowed to disappear without trace when the street bins were removed. And the council did nothing about it…
Bin-less: More than 60 street bins vanished from Norbury and its high street. Croydon Council claimed they knew nothing about it
“Norbury was the only place where all the usual street-side litter bins had been removed across the whole area, leaving only the big belly bins,” Hooker said, noting that the bins around Thornton Heath Pond and in Broad Green were also removed.
In July 2021, Hooker delivered a report to Steve Iles, the council director responsible, including maps and a petition signed by more than 60 businesses on Norbury high street.
Hooker never received a response.
Two years later, in August 2023, with Iles by now having left Croydon Council, Hooker took another senior council official on a walkabout of Norbury’s littered streets.
This exercise did, at least, yield a written response from the official, and an admission that their records were inadequate: “I would also like to note that the current database held by the council is out of date and needs to be fully audited across the borough. My intention is to commence this work with immediate effect.”
“With immediate effect”. Sounded promising.
In July 2024, Hooker was told by another council official that the borough-wide bin audit, which was due to begin “with immediate effect” 12 months earlier “is about to start”.
More than a month later, Hooker got another email from a council official. “I can confirm that the audit has not been completed as originally envisaged,” it said. Apparently, this work had now been “prioritised”. The bin audit was to be completed “no later than the end of October 2024”.
He did warn us: Mayor Perry’s warning soon after taking office is just about the truest thing he has said since 2022
October 2024 slipped into November 2024 by the time Hooker got the next update on the slow-motion audit of the council’s bins.
What was supposed to have been a borough-wide bin audit starting “with immediate effect” in July 2023 had now become a litter bin audit in Norbury, which “we are currently finalising”.
The council official wrote: “I will ensure that our findings correctly identify all absence [sic] litter bins which need replacing.” Which is nice.
Remember, Hooker, and the businesses of Norbury, had been chasing this matter for more than four years by this point.
In April this year, Karen Agbabiaka, the council’s director of streets and environment, wrote to Hooker, “In relation to the bin audit… the council went live with our new waste contract on April 1 2025 and as a result the team have been focusing on the mobilisation of that contract.
“So unfortunately, we have been unable to undertake the borough-wide bin audit.”
That’s the borough-wide bin audit which was supposed to have begun “with immediate effect” in July 2023, after the council admitted that their data was rubbish and needed a proper survey to look into how many bins had been removed from the borough’s streets to reduce the workload of rubbish contractors Veolia.
Binned the bin audit: Karen Agbabiaka has since quit Croydon Council
Now we have had it confirmed that the borough-wide audit was never done.
But to have it explained that this was not done because Veolia have been handed a juicy new contract is quite the development.
As Inside Croydon was first to report, Agbabiaka is among several directors to have left their council jobs in recent times, part of a constant churn which is clearly doing nothing for the efficient management of the cash-strapped council’s often over-stretched services. “Every time I attempt to contact someone at the council, they have either left, or on leave, or are on long-term sick,” Hooker said. “It’s getting beyond a joke.”
Hooker resumed his pursuit of the long-promised bin audit and some hoped-for replacement bins by writing to Agbabiaka’s replacement, an interim director called Tony Ralph. But even Ralph has now handed in his notice, and Hooker has never had even a courtesy acknowledgement from him.
“For Norbury, this work could be undertaken in a morning and documented in the afternoon – so it’s one day’s work,” Hooker said.
“Appropriately resourced, the audit of the entire borough could be undertaken within a month. But here we are, years later, and nothing has been done.
“In my entire working life if I had ever failed so miserably to deliver on such a relatively simple project such as this I would have expected to be fired. There appears to be zero accountability.”
Read more: #Binmageddon: 1,000 street bins have vanished from borough
Read more: Perry’s piles: Mayor’s video shows rubbish contractors are failing
Read more: #Binmageddon: Now Croydon named worst in UK for fly-tipping
Read more: You’ve bin done: council paying over the odds for solar bins
Read more: More churn at the top as interim directors leave the council
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors 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
- 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
