Council blasted for rewarding 'distinctly average' bin collection service with £150m contract extension

A west London council has been accused of rewarding a "distinctly average" bin collection service with a £150 million contract extension.Read MoreEaling Council is facing criticism after handing Greener Ealing, the council-owned company responsible for waste collections and street cleaning, an extra five years on its existing deal.Opposition councillors unsuccessfully attempted to force a rethink of the decision, arguing residents deserve better from a service they say has fallen short.Liberal Democrat finance spokesman Jonathan Oxley said the firm's performance was "simply not good enough".Jonathan Oxley, a Liberal Democrat councillor in EalingEaling CouncilHe accused the council of failing to open the contract to competition.Addressing the overview and scrutiny committee on Thursday, Mr Oxley said the call-in request was backed by 18 cross-party councillors.He said: “The administration is proposing to extend Greener Ealing’s contract until 2035. It is highly unusual for an extension of this size, circa £350 million [its value over 15 years], to be non-competitive, and this alone warrants further scrutiny.”Mr Oxley pointed to performance inconsistencies across the borough, and ongoing failures regarding vulnerable residents. The firm had “persistently” missed collections at the homes of disabled and elderly residents, he said, despite the contract setting out that there should be no missed collections for people in those categories.“This is not an ideological debate,” Mr Oxley continued. “We don’t object in principle to services being delivered by a local authority-owned company like GEL, provided it performs well and it offers value for money. “Unfortunately, GEL’s performance is distinctly average, and that is simply not good enough for our borough.”Councillor Dominic Moffit, the Labour cabinet member for climate action, pushed back against the opposition’s criticisms.Dominic Moffitt, a Labour Ealing cabinet memberLDRSHe told the committee that the decision had not been what opponents called an “uncompetitive process”, claiming a full tendering process would have cost £120,000, not £12,000.“As a local authority-owned company, a decision to extend the contract by the council does not need to go through any kind of procurement process,” Mr Moffit explained.“The financial advice from the independent adjudicator was that we had taken the most appropriate course of action.“In the last couple of years, there have been between eight and 10 missed assisted collections. There are 3,000 in the borough every week, every fortnight – that’s 0.3% of those collections that are being missed.“While the target is zero because we absolutely want to make sure we get all of those done, I don’t think we should think that this represents some enormous egregious failure of service delivery to some of our most vulnerable residents, who are actually well looked after by GEL across the borough.”After the separate arguments were heard, the committee, which has a Labour majority, voted to reject the call-in, upholding the original cabinet decision.