Environment Select

As flagged previously last Wednesday evening saw a meeting of the
Environment Select Committee which was considering the ongoing proposals to
give PCSO's the powers to issue fines, along with consideration of concerns
over the bin and recycling collection service.

Although I missed part of the debate on the PCSO issue, it seemed from what
I heard and from comments afterwards that despite the work that has been
done by the council on this proposal over the previous weeks and months
(with some mentioning that this has been ongoing for almost 2 years) the
main stumbling block on moving this forward is the police, with the meeting
essentially going ground that has been covered on various occasions before.

However despite the apparent lack of progress we are however advised by
officers that the time has been well spent and the may be improvements to
areas where the council along with the police can share information to
better target the work of the council's enforcement officer.

In terms of the concerns over the performance of Veolia the contractor
tasked by the council with taking care of the bin and recycling collections,
the committee received a presentation from Veolia' s regional manager which
looked at a variety of the issue on the service and how to a certain extent
due to a lack of information at the start from the council and our previous
recycling contractor things have taken a little while to get going.

However whilst reviewing what went wrong can be useful, and they did accept
the various concerns that members had, they wanted to move on and advised us
of a action plan that had been together and approved by the council's
executive member which will see amongst other things additional training for
the existing staff included in particular customer services training,
ongoing reviews and improvements to the information provided to and from the
councils call centre so they can respond to problems better, and a step to
come which may effect people when it comes round in terms of reviewing the
existing collection rounds to make sure they are the most efficient they can
be.

Hopefully the steps they are been put in place will improve the existing
service, but if they don't please make sure you complain, so the issues can
be raised and dealt with.