Efforts To Modernise Brighton And Hove Rubbish Service Drag On

Efforts to modernise the council’s Cityclean rubbish and recycling service have been under way for more than seven years without apparently “reaching” the streets, councillors said.

They criticised the time being taken by Brighton and Hove City Council to switch from old-fashioned paper-shuffling to a 21st-century digital set up. An earlier council report gave a timeline from 2020-22.

Green councillor Pete West, who chairs the council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee, said that the modernisation work had taken eight years and counting.

Referring to an audit report, Councillor West said: 

“There is a long list here about concerns in relation to this.

“It feels to me the question is does Cityclean have sufficient project management strength to be able to deliver this novel programme. That’s what’s jumping off the page at me. I will need to be convinced.

“Cityclean has struggled with a whole number of things and I appreciate this is not going to be easy to achieve.”

Conservative councillor Anne Meadows said that residents in her ward, Patcham and Hollingbury, were complaining about rubbish not being collected, particularly garden waste because the council charged a fee for that service.

Councillor Meadows said that residents did not understand the “Digital Cityclean” project to bring in suitable IT systems. She said: 

“You’re moving everything that was on paper to digital but I can’t understand why that has such an impact on the service itself.

“I wondered what the timescale for completion was for this digital thing because it feels like it’s an unnecessary upset for residents in some way.”

The modernisation project goes back to at least the start of 2018 and, after some scoping work, the Digital Cityclean project got under way in 2020.

A report to councillors said: 

“The City Environment Improvement Programme has been delivering improvements to the Cityclean service since 2018 in the context of reducing council budgets and increasing customer demand.

“The programme has a total of 17 projects, including a Digital Cityclean project to implement new integrated waste management software.

“The Digital Cityclean project is a programme of five phases / projects to digitise data and automate processes within Cityclean services.”

These include digitising customer invoices and payments, providing real-time information to residents, using route planning software and bringing in mobile technology for street-cleansing teams.

The five phases relate to trade waste, garden waste, bulky collections, domestic collections and street cleaning.

The report said: 

“The first of five phases of the Digital Cityclean project – moving from a paper-based system to automated processes for trade waste customers – has been completed.

“In reviewing the current arrangements, we found that there were several areas where we could advise further improvements that could be helpful in controlling and ensuring delivery of the remainder of the project.”

These included ensuring that the right people were available when needed and improving the ability of council managers “to track progress and meet key timelines”.

The auditors also said that the project team should resume regular performance and progress updates to councillors to provide transparency and accountability.

But none of the project team leaders were present when the council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee met at Hove Town Hall yesterday (Tuesday 22 April).

As a result, a number of questions from councillors could not be answered but members were told that the Cityclean management would be expected to attend the committee’s next meeting in June.