Thousands of homes left off bin collection routes

The council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee has been discussing the mistake

Thousands of homes were mistakenly left off a council's bin collection database, leaving their waste and recycling boxes missed out of rounds.

Errors were made in the planning phase of Swindon Borough Council's update to its collection regime, a meeting was told.

It meant the authority did not include the houses when drawing up new collection routes.

Sharing how the oversight emerged, Chris Watts, cabinet member for highways and the environment, said: "We were looking at why we were seeing people complain about missed collections which were not in the system when we found several thousand homes were not put into the system."

'Complete chaos'

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Mr Watts presented his annual report to the council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee which was followed by questions.

Conservative councillor Daniel Adams asked: "What score would you give yourself so far?”

Mr Watts responded: “For the efforts against the constraints we faced and the work put in to stop the system going into complete chaos, I’d give the staff 10.”

He said a large number of the problems since November were down to assumptions made in the planning phase which turned out to be incorrect.

In addition, a position to run a back office system was never filled, he added.

Committee chairman Dale Heenan asked Mr Watts when he had made the final decision to go ahead with the new regime.

He agreed the date was 5 October last year, and that he sat on the project board overseeing it.

But he emphasised the planning of the scheme had been finished by the time he took over the cabinet portfolio.