Coventry council plan to axe weekly household waste collections in bid to make budget savings
Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2016 4:22 am
The council say food waste could be put in garden waste bins on alternate weeks as part of a "redesign" of waste collection
Household waste bins will only be collected every other week if council cost saving plans are approved.
Coventry council budget proposals released today also show residents can expect to be hit with a four per cent increase to the authority’s chunk of the overall council tax bill as they target £36million of further savings by 2020.
The council is also proposing hundreds of job losses, changes to bin collections, potential increases to car parking charges and possible future reductions in council tax support for the city’s poorest residents.
An eight week public consultation into the proposed cuts is set to begin before the end of the year.
Here, in part one of our budget analysis, we take a look at how the changes will hit the city’s services:
Bin collectionsThe council is set to “redesign” bin collections in a bid to save £1m a year.
Green household waste bins would only be collected every other week under the proposals. They are currently collected every week.
However, fortnightly brown lidded garden waste bin collection would run all year round under the new system - on alternate weekends to the household bin collections.
Residents would be allowed to put food waste in the garden waste bins on weeks when household waste is not collected.
There would be no change to the blue lidded fortnightly bin collections.
Coun John Mutton, the council's cabinet member for finance, said: “Residents will still be able to dispose of their food waste every week, either in the green bin or in the brown bins.”
Car parkingA full review of car parking in the city is underway as the council looks to increase the profit made in this area.
The council is looking to reduce the number of spaces in the city centre citing an “over provision” at present.
Formal plans are yet to be drawn up, but they’re likely to result in less spaces and increased parking charges.
Bereavement servicesResidents were recently hit by a massive rise in burial and cremation costs, but the budget proposals suggest there could be more to come over the next three years.
City residents can now expect to pay £964 instead of £790 previously for an adult burial and £737 instead of £641 for an adult cremation.
Those figures came into force earlier this month and could be set to increase further before 2020.
RoadsThere is due to be a £100,000 reduction to the highways repair budget from April.
But the council budget report insists potholes deeper than 1.5in will still be repaired within five days.
Coun Mutton said: “I would hope the backlog of repair work would continue to get smaller.
“In 2010 we increased the annual budget for road repairs by £3m.”
What is the scale of the cuts?
The £36m cuts targeted for 2020 amount to roughly 15 per cent of the council’s overall budget.
About £95m of central government funding has been lost already since austerity kicked in during 2010. That amount is expected to increase to £120m by 2020.
When the council reaches 2020 roughly £650m will have been saved since 2010.