All-party Waste Summit - Open letter

From: Councillor Anthony Fairclough
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2022 5:45:05 PM
To: Councillor Natasha Irons <Natasha.Irons@merton.gov.uk>; Councillor Ross Garrod <Ross.Garrod@merton.gov.uk>
Subject: All-party Waste Summit - Open Letter

Dear both

New all-party Waste Summit

Hope you are well, and congratulations on your election and appointment as leader and cabinet member respectively!

I wanted to follow up on my speech from yesterday by formally asking you to set up an all-party summit on waste management arrangements, particularly to pinpoint the areas of concern but also to begin to look potential ways forward.

There are also undoubtedly some quick wins: action that the Council could take now to clean up our streets and manage our contractors more effectively.

Significant improvement will require all options to be looked at, including termination of the existing waste contracts, or the substantial renegotiation of them. Should either of those approaches be taken, it will take considerable work and could lead to additional costs. Change management on this scale would need strong project leadership and effective scrutiny.

An all-party Waste Summit would at least be an opportunity to increase everyone’s understanding of the issues, which in turn could make a joint approach possible.

In terms of my group’s priorities, we would highlight the below as potential workstreams. These won significant support from residents during the recent local elections:

• Prioritise street sweeping after collections to tackle leftover litter
• Investigate regular pop-up “community waste collections”, where you can drop off items nearer you, instead of driving to the tip 
• Better and active contract management and monitoring – ensuring the Council’s contractors are challenged when services fail and bins are overflowing
• A focus on problems with collections from blocks of flats
• Taking stronger action against flytippers and tackling ‘grot spots’.

We would also like to highlight some work recently undertaken by Newham on flytipping - this shows both what is possible, and also a different approach to understanding the problems.

As I said last night, I think by working together we really could win for everyone – a real fresh start for our area.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes

Anthony

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Cllr Anthony Fairclough
Leader of the Opposition

Wimbledon Town and Dundonald (Liberal Democrat)