Cookham Discussion Board

At an extraordinary communities overview and scrutiny meeting on October 1 (Thursday) Serco representatives revealed that ‘significant’ challenges were faced when introducing a new ‘target operation model’ in August.

This model involved new routes being introduced – which affected 20,000 households at “very short notice” – as they haven’t changed in 15 years to make them more environmentally friendly.

Councillors were told that “a programme of this scale and complexity” would usually take between three to six months to plan and another three months for the service to stabilise as “business as usual” – but this was implemented in just five weeks.

Panel members heard that despite knowing the ‘high risks’ of reverting back quickly may disrupt the service, the council ultimately decided to bring back the weekly collections.

Problems escalated when the council moved to a new data system for people to report problems or their missed collections with Serco having difficulties searching and exporting information from it.

Katy Bassett, Serco's Regional Director, said during the pandemic, the service experienced a staff shortage of 21 per cent due to shielding whereas the volume of waste was 40 per cent higher.