Thank you for patience during continued garden waste suspensions
Friday, 6 August 2021
The suspension of garden waste collections across Central Bedfordshire will remain in place until further notice.
We don't anticipate this service resuming in August, due to ongoing and significant LGV driver shortages.
We thank all our residents who are impacted by the suspension for their patience and ask them to continue to bear with us, whilst work is undertaken to resolve the disruption. We're asking all residents to not leave their garden waste bins out for collection during this time.
For now, we're working with our contractor, FCC, to prioritise our crews and drivers on the collection of critical household waste such as clinical waste, residual waste (black bin) and dry recycling collections – all of which remain unaffected.
Like many local authorities – both locally and nationally – we've been significantly affected by a national shortage of LGV drivers as well as staff needing to self-isolate due to the ongoing pandemic. The result of this labour market pressure, which is affecting the whole economy, means that our waste collection teams have been stretched to the limit. We've increased efforts to stabilise crew numbers, to reduce the strain being caused.
Councillor Ian Dalgarno, our Executive Member for Community Services said:
We want to let residents know that at this stage, the ongoing impact of driver shortages is continuing to impact on our ability to resume garden waste collections – and could continue to do so for several weeks.
We are sorry that our residents are being impacted by the suspension – and we thank them for their patience, whilst our teams work hard to prioritise critical household waste collections and explores different avenues to resolve the staffing shortages.
We encourage residents to help us during this time, by looking at alternative ways to manage their garden waste – such as the use of home composting where possible.
Garden waste can still be recycled at any of our four tidy tips which are open seven days a week from 9am to 5pm, including bank holidays. Additional appointment slots have been added to help residents.
We'll keep this decision under constant review.