EXCLUSIVE: Wychavon council has selected Serco as the preferred bidder for its waste and recycling collections contract, which will end its 23-year relationship with FCC Environment.
At a meeting last week councillors for the Worcestershire district’s executive board were told that Serco had returned the lowest price bid for the contract – which could be extended up to 2037 – and endorsed the decision to appoint the business as preferred supplier.
Serco is preferred to inherit the Wychavon collections contract from October 2017
It is expected that the Serco contract will create the £200,000 finance savings as identified in the council’s Grow, Save, Charge business plan.
Wychavon had initially aimed to jointly procure a collections contract with neighbouring Worcester city and Malvern Hills district councils.
However, Worcester pulled out of the procurement last year following a change in administration, and Malvern Hills last week confirmed it too saw ‘no benefit’ to outsourcing the service and would look to reduced refuse collections instead (see letsrecycle.com story).
In a report presented by councillor Emma Stokes, Wychavon’s cabinet member for environment, it was confirmed that the price returned for Malvern Hills had been higher than its current expenditure on environmental services and that its expectations could not be met.
Serco
Serco has meanwhile proposed a range of new measures it will roll out in Wychavon as part of its contract, which if signed is due to begin in October 2017.
These include kerbside collections of small WEEE and batteries, and a target to reduce service carbon emissions by 30%. Dry recyclables and garden waste will also be collected in the same vehicle to reduce mileage.
Serco will also employ a commercial development manager to help increase garden and commercial waste customers, and link up with charity Roundabout to maximise reuse of furniture collected as part of the bulky waste service.
Confirming the choice of Serco at an executive committee meeting last week, Cllr Stokes said that FCC had served the council’s residents “very well” over the past 23 years and hoped that the new supplier Serco would do the same for “potentially 20 years”.
Malvern Hills council looks set to retain in-house collections
However, concerns were raised by the executive committee over staffing and ‘problems that other councils had had with Serco’.
Cllr Stokes responded that Serco’s performance would be checked against the council’s specification, and that the business would be invited to a future Overview and Scrutiny committee to explain how it will run the service.
Contracts
Serco announced it had been awarded over £45 million worth of UK environmental contracts in 2016, including a three-year extension to current recycling collections on behalf of Charnwood borough council.
Wychavon council is expected to officially comment on the contract award following a ‘10-day standstill period’ following its decision. Serco has been approached for comment.
- For more in-depth discussion of the latest trends in waste collections, be sure to check out the 2017 Collections Conference here.
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Source: letsrecycle.com Waste Managment
