Wednesday 23 October 2013

Bin service communications - do they know who they're talking to?

I had a mailing yesterday from the Council about the bin service.

It was a standard letter from the Mayor about the changes.

It explained that people with  wheelie bins would have their purple bin emptied just once a fortnight instead of once a week.  It went on to make some points about recycling and landfill.

Ok, you'd think.  It's good they're keeping people informed.

Except in my area (traditional terraces in Garston) nothing is changing.  We are not having our frequency changed and the day stays the same.

In other words the Council is telling people for whom there is no change that there is a change.

(You can imagine how many people have read the letter and thought the collections were changing for them)

Now it's true that there are enclosures and if you go on and refer to the calendar, you can work out that Canterbury Street and those nearby will have no change.

But my point is this.  If there is literally no change, why spend money writing to people?

If the Council wants to promote more recycling and composting by those in terraced properties, surely it would be better to do this as a separate project with the right messages for those people
 (which would need to major quite heavily on storage).

Instead money has been spent on, frankly, spreading confusion.

I had thought they were paying rather a lot of money to a "comms expert" at the moment.

I sincerely hope they're not as if they are they are not getting what they pay for.

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