“I’m desperately sorry to any resident inconvenienced by the pausing of green waste collections.”
That’s the apology from Cllr John Halsall, leader of Wokingham Borough Council, over the decision to suspend the service for four weeks due to a driver shortage.
The pause allows contractors Veolia to ensure it can continue to collect blue bags, food waste and recycling on a weekly basis across Wokingham borough.
“Veolia has reacted quite positively in order to protect their collections,” he said. “My understanding is they’ve encourages people to take their accumulated holidays off, that has made them short of crews and they’ve built in that firebreak, so we’re not running into problems when we are in the Christmas and winter periods.”
Cllr Halsall said that while some people were concerned about autumnal leaves, the four-week period would avoid the worst of the changing seasons.
“They say it’s actually a good time because the growth has stopped and it’s prior to the period in which you start tucking away everything for winter.”
The council says it is undertaking a range of measures to keep disruption to waste collection services as much as possible, including working with Veolia on their HGV driver training and recruitment programmes, incentives schemes for new hires and retention bonuses and lobbying the government to take steps to help resolve the shortage.
The scheme has been paused until October 31, but the subscription period will be extended for four weeks between May 1 and 29, 2022 as a result.
The delay includes a suspension of bin deliveries and allowing residents to sign up.
