Green Bag Collections
Added on 23 May 2022
The Vale have informed us that residents will be increasingly aware that their green waste collection service continues to be a little inconsistent and this remains as a result of the national LGV driver shortage.
If you are not aware, this service is non statutory and solely relies on seasonal drivers not employed all year by the Council, and provided through employment agencies. [This is the case in Bridgend where residents have to ;pay for the green bag collections]. At present, there are not enough qualified drivers available within the industry for us to maintain this service and collect on the correct scheduled collection day[s]. It’s fair to say that its generally known that this service is non statutory and an enhanced service which residents are generally patient with and over the years if it’s not collected on the correct day, it’s become accepted that we’ll return at the earliest opportunity and we rarely have complaints about this arrangement.
However, it is likely that we will have some periods where we’ll need to ask residents to take their green waste back in, if we are unable to collect it by Sunday of the week their collection is due and represent their waste on the next scheduled collection day. We will not have capacity to return the following week. At present, we are relying on the good will of our permanent staff to bridge the resource gap and to undertake additional hours late afternoons and or on weekends.
This is obviously not sustainable and we continue to express planned training and upskill other staff in-house to provide longer term resilience but unfortunately it is likely that there will remain some disruption in the short term. This is not unique the Vale of Glamorgan and it is affecting other industries as well such as food supplies, deliveries etc…
We will continue to update the Council’s website and use social media to post regular updates so we can keep our residents as up to date as practically possible. Additionally we are going to explore the weekly email reminders (these remind residents which collection is due i.e. green or black bags) to see if we can include green waste updates on those, so we can capture a much wider audience.
Vale Officers apologise for the lack of service and wish to assure us that they continue to explore short term solutions to this problem and aim to bring back consistency within this service at the earliest opportunity.