CROYDON IN CRISIS: The rubbish contractor handed a £40m eight-year contract by Mayor Jason Perry, just two years after he sacked them for underperforming, is now taking longer to clear fly-tips than under their old deal. NORA BERRY reports
Down the pan: Veolia’s performance on fly-tips has got worse since April
Figures compiled by resident campaigners at Litter Free Norbury show that the performance of the council’s rubbish contractors, Veolia, has got much worse since Mayor Jason Perry handed them a new, £40million, eight-year deal in April.
Tony Hooker, of Litter Free Norbury, has studied publicly available figures for fly-tip clearances and says that Veolia’s performance has “taken a nosedive” since the start of the new contract, with the contractor managing to clear reported fly-tips in an average of under 24 hours only once in the past six months.
Hooker is still waiting for Croydon Council to respond to his repeated requests for sight of the revised Veolia contract, to allow him to check the updated performance indicators the contractors are expected to achieve.
But he has been able to check data to keep tabs on the fly-tip clear-up rates.
“We first noticed issues last December,” Hooker says of the pace of fly-tip clearance, “and it has felt like it hasn’t recovered. Indeed, has got a lot worse since the start of the new contract.”
Hooker’s analysis suggests that his patch of Croydon, Norbury, gets a less good service from Veolia than other wards in the borough. And Hooker also thinks that Veolia has been fiddling the figures, too.
“The figures don’t tell the whole story,” Hooker said. “The reality is worse.”
Hooker has found:
- Reports closed as “complete” when Veolia has not attended the reported fly-tip site.
- Reports closed when no resolution has been made as the crew stated “Not Found” (when the tipped rubbish is still there).
- Reports closed due to another “resolution code” being provided that states that the issue is on “Private Land” (when it isn’t) or due to other factors such as “H and S issue” (so the fly-tip remains in situ).
- Reports closed as “Duplicates”, when no other open report appears to exist at the same location.
- Reports that are not processed by Veolia’s system due to other technical issues.
It is worth remembering that in 2023, Veolia were sacked for poor performance by Croydon and two other members of the South London Waste Partnership: Sutton and Merton councils.
Flawed performance: Litter Free Norbury’s Facebook page makes a point about Veolia’s erratic performance, such as clearing away a single bin bag (right) within two days, while leaving behind a festering pile just a few feet away that was first reported a week earlier
Croydon, Sutton and Merton all re-contracted Veolia this year, when no other contractor was able to match the uber-low quote for the work submitted by Veolia. Previous performance records appeared to have been forgotten when awarding the multi-million-pound contracts.
Hooker’s work raises the serious matter of what monitoring of Veolia’s performance is being undertaken by Croydon’s cash-strapped council, where there are significantly fewer staff to undertake such work than there were four or five years ago.
The lack of any sign of action on the matter on behalf of the public by the cabinet member responsible, the utterly useless Tory councillor Scott Roche, or by failed Mayor Perry, suggests that they are keeping their heads down ahead of the local elections next May, hoping no one notices.
The chart below provides analysis of the average completion times of fly-tipping reports across each month. Hooker has broken out the figure for the two Norbury wards to provide a direct comparison to the borough-wide figure.
Charted: Litter Free Norbury has crunched the council figures, both borough-wide (in green) and across Norbury’s two wards (purple). The clear-up rate has got worse since the new contract in April
Hooker says that previously, the average clean-up rate “reflected a good level of performance, often around 12 hours, and generally was under 24″.
But since the new contract began,” those figures have taken a nosedive”. Hooker said: “It is also noticeable that the Norbury completion time figure is generally always higher than across the rest of the borough. That gap has been widening over the past couple of months, with Norbury returning an average completion of 46.5 hours for October.”
“It is 100% clear that Veolia’s performance with regards to fly-tip removal has massively decreased since April 1,” Hooker said.
Hooker says that he wants Mayor Perry to conduct “an urgent review of what is going wrong with Veolia’s performance since the start of the new contract”.
Read more: Saga of Croydon’s vanished bins and the audit that never was
Read more: April Fools! £40m Veolia contract comes into force tomorrow
Read more: #BINMAGEDDON: Perry sneaks out charges for wheelie bins
Read more: Croydon and three other boroughs to bin Veolia rubbish deal
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Tony Hooker deserves an award for his exposure of Veolia’s fibs and downright lies. He has also shown how Perry’s clean-up blitzes, which started in Norbury over 2 years ago, are simply photo opportunities for clearing up Veolia’s failings. They do nothing to tackle the company’s preference for profits over performance.
It’s not just “the utterly useless Tory councillor Scott Roche” or “failed Mayor Perry” who are “keeping their heads down ahead of the local elections next May, hoping no one notices.”
What are Leila Ben-Hassel, Matt Griffiths, Alisa Flemming and Appu Srinivasan, the four Labour councillors in Norbury, doing to earn their keep? Same goes for Chris Herman, Shadow Cabinet Member for Streets and Environment. It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone to knock seven bells out of Roche’s appalling record, but he doesn’t even try
If anyone is wondering why this has a thumbs down, my finger slipped and I can’t change it. Apologies! I think Arfur makes a good point.
That explains all the thumbs down that Myers gets
That’s no way to treat your biggest fan