Serco rubbish contract report published – in part

Rather later than promised the 'independent review' into Derbyshire Dales District Council's contract for waste services with Serco has been published.

Or rather 44 pages of it has been - another part of the report has been classified as exempt and has not been released to the public, although apparently councillors can read it.

This is we believe because of the financially and legally sensitive nature of the information it contains. So Appendix 2 of the report is only for a select few.

What can we learn form Appendix 1?

This summarises the work carried out by Allen Graham of Circling Squares. (Just to be confusing Appendix 2, the interesting one that we cannot read, is a summary of work carried out by Recircle Consulting - not sure why we have a circles themed review!)

Some of it is scene setting with 8 pages detailing the terms of reference, methodology and the timeline of Covid related government interventions like working from home and relaxation of Key Performance indicators.

The rest paints a rather depressing picture of a small council trying to introduce a new contract with new working practices whilst being required by central government to look after Covid grants. An enormous burden fell to just one person who (understandably) perhaps tried to shoulder too much of the responsibility. All whilst trying to work from home. It also seems to have taken a long time for those further up the chain of command to appreciate that there was a serious problem. A key issue appears to be that precise data as to how much waste was being collected and from where was not being secured. Often the data that was collected was subsequently challenged by Serco when it was used to indicate a shortfall in contract delivery. It seems that the in-cab monitoring of vehicle movement and associated software was fitted late and even when working had difficulty in interfacing with the Council's internal support system. It begs the question what was being used to monitor performance whilst he equipment was not fitted or they were still using the old bin lorries?

What is clear in the report is the fact that the significantly impaired service that Serco have provided for much of the last two years has cost almost £1 million above what was budgeted, with a further £100k+ deficit predicted for next year.

How much is recoverable from Serco remains to be seen - perhaps that is in Appendix 2.

The report is due to be discussed at a Full Council meeting on 17th February. You can find the agenda which contains the report here.

There is also a detailed article about the report in Eddie Bisknell's piece for Derbyshire Live