St Albans City and District Council is formulating a strategy for improving the delivery of key services during periods of severe winter weather in order to minimise any future disruption to their provision.
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At a meeting on 2 March 2009, Cabinet was presented with various options and recommendations and agreed that Cllr Donald, Leader of the Council, and Daniel Goodwin, the Council’s Chief Executive would lead the development of a strategy for improving the delivery of services during disruptive weather.
As part of that strategy, Cabinet agreed that priority would be given to the delivery of key services, including the housing of the homeless, urgent housing repairs, refuse collections, burials and benefit payments.
It also reviewed the arrangements for refuse and recycling as the service was particularly affected by the last bout of severe weather. It decided:
• that there would be no change to the current ‘catch up’ arrangements for disruptions to refuse and recycling services lasting 1-2 working days in duration. When the service is resumed, the focus will be on collecting the backlog by visiting the streets that were missed first and working through these until the normal schedule can be followed. The process will be aided by using Saturday as an additional catch up day.
• to amend the current strategy for refuse and recycling so that for periods of disruption lasting 3-7 working days a “collect all” policy will be adopted. This means that once collections re-commence all green and black bins put out by residents will be collected and the waste in them sent to landfill. Scheduled collections for the twin bin system will then be resumed on the following week.
Further recommendations to help improve the delivery of services during severe weather are contained in Council’s Winter Weather Management Review which is available on the Council’s website. These include using Twitter to communicate changes in service delivery to residents, providing gritters to local parishes and liaising with Hertfordshire Highways to ensure that priority pedestrian routes and heavily-used roads are gritted.
Cllr Robert Donald, Leader of the Council, said: “The Council overcame many of the challenges of the recent winter weather, which was the worst for 30 years, and continued to deliver its services to the community. However, I do think we could improve our refuse and recycling service in the event of similar circumstances occurring next winter to ensure the consistency and regularity of the service is maintained across the whole District. We have therefore decided to amend our policy to help improve the delivery of the refuse service during severe winter weather and to plan for prolonged periods of snow lasting a week or more.
“On the other priority services we did really very well in ensuring they continued to be provided to residents, for example, in the case of Meals On Wheels for the elderly and homebound and markets. This was down to the dedicated efforts of volunteers, council contractors and staff who worked very hard to keep services going. The review has also suggested how our success with these priority services can be further improved in the future, especially by partnership working with our contractors. ”
A full report on the Winter Arrangements for Refuse, Recycling and Street Cleaning Services is available on the Council’s website.
Member contact:
Cllr Robert Donald, Leader of St Albans City and District Council
Tel: 01727 841647
Contact for the press:
Amanda Wilkinson, communication officer
St Albans City and District Council
Tel: 01727 819317
E-mail: amanda.wilk