Chaos over blue bins

The Introduction of new blue recycling bins in Stafford has been labelled "chaotic and mismanaged" after some were delivered broken and others turned up just hours before the first collection.

Some residents were left frustrated and confused by the launch of the new fortnightly waste collection service in the borough and others were dismayed to find the bins were either delivered broken or their newspaper caddies were damaged during the first collection round.

The calls centre dealing with complaints and queries has struggled to cope, with some callers waiting more than 10 minutes to be put through. A further setback came yesterday when technical problems with the phones led to more delays.

Stafford Borough Council's Liberal Democrat group leader Councillor Barry Stamp said bins were only delivered to residents in Haughton hours before they were first due to be collected. He said: "Over the past few days I have been inundated with calls from Haughton residents all wanting to know when they were going to get their new blue recycling bins and on what day they would be collected.

"It was only when the borough council published the collection dates on their website in the middle of last week that I found out the collection day for the majority of Haughton residents, including myself, had been changed from Monday to Tuesday.

"What was also puzzling everyone was that the new blue wheelie bins had not been delivered. I raised this problem with the council, only to be told they were on the way. They finally arrived just hours before the first collection was due."

He added: "The whole change-over to this new fortnightly collection service has been chaos. Even the council's call centre is failing to cope with the increased number of calls from residents either complaining about the new bin service or wanting to find out what is happening."

But Councillor Stan Highfield, cabinet member for the environment, said: "This is a huge operation rolled out to around 55,000 homes borough-wide. Of course, with an operation of this size, we do expect teething problems in the early stages and have put plans into place to tackle them. We apologise to residents who have experienced problems in the roll-out and we ask them to bear with us in these early days." He said broken caddies were being replaced. But he added that the new recycling service was proving a big success, with an 80 per cent increase in recycling in some areas.