Agenda item

The Strategic Director will be attending the meeting to present to Members the current budget issues facing this service.

Sue Harper, Strategic Director of Environment and Neighbourhoods, introduced the report, explaining that the Environment and Neighbourhoods department looked quite different from last year. The biggest change had been the move of the Waste and Recycling team to the Neighbourhoods division. This had happened as they had gone out to tender for a new public realm contract which also included grounds maintenance and it therefore made sense for all of it to sit under one Operational Director. It was also explained that following the corporate restructure that Environment and Neighbourhoods had also assumed responsibility for the Registrars and Nationality service, as well as Strategic Transportation. Finally Community Safety were also reporting to Sue Harper. Therefore the department was much larger than it was last year. Despite its size, the department was still due to be £14k under budget this year. It was explained that part of the £2m showing in the directorate budget was the community safety budget. 

Recycling and Waste and Parking were deemed to be the biggest key risk areas in the department for the upcoming year. Parking was currently forecast to be £63k over budget. Parking was deemed to be a risk for a number of reasons including the fact that a new external company had recently taken over the parking contract. It had been forecast that there would be a temporary drop in productivity at this time and this had been a correct assumption. It was explained that future parking charges estimates had been based on assumptions about behaviour change by motorists and that this was very hard to predict. Therefore they may need to reassess the expected income from parking in the future. Parking was being monitored closely though, especially as it was a One Council project and therefore monthly updates were given at DMT.

Recycling and Waste was also deemed to be a high risk area as it had been forecast to overspend by £850k at the start of 2013/14. This had now been reduced to £12k overspend. It was explained that there were a number of reasons for the reduction in overspend. This included organic waste collection being down in June and July, which reflected a national trend. It was believed that this was partly due to the dry weather which meant people had not been cutting their grass as often. It was also due to the work done at the Twyford Reuse centre and BHP, who were disposing of their own waste now. The department had also changed the way they dealt with fly tippers. If it was traders who were consistently offending then the council were enforcing penalties. The council had also now rolled out organic waste bins to flats.

When questioned how much education and outreach they did to educate people, Jenny Isaac informed members that they had tried a number of approaches to educate people. They were working with people in the parts of the borough where recycling was lowest to encourage and educate them about recycling. They were also working with people in the borough where recycling was slightly below average and could be improved. They had also visited primary schools in the past but were delaying that this year until the winter months. Members queried how the department monitored waste and recycling. It was explained that they broke waste down into residual, dry and organic waste and looked at the tonnage per year and the cost per tonne. This was monitored and analysed fortnightly. The officers agreed that more needed to be done by Central Government to make companies stop using excessive packaging.