Last week at The Overview and Scrutiny committee, Cllr Mahfouz, the Cabinet member with responsibility for the rubbish and recycling service made an announcement about compensating residents who had not received a standard of service that they had paid for over the last 3 months.
The Conservaitve group had tried to have a debate at the last full council about compensating residents who had paid their council tax and not had their rubbish and recycling taken away in a timely manner and didn't have their streets swept properly either.
On two occasions, every single Labour Councillor in the chamber voted against debating this. It looks like they have now decided that we were right after all, and that residents should be compensated.
Here's what Cllr Mahfouz announced. The council currently collects garden waste very two weeks now, instead of every week. They will add one more collection to the rota for garden waste only.
That's the compensation package. Pretty pathetic really, when as many as 40,000 people had missed collections in April alone and the council didn't answer the phone to over 5,000 people in April too.
Cllr Colm Costello who was at the meeting pointed out that "Fewer than 9,500 people have their garden waste collected by the council, so over 80% of people won't benefit from this offer of compensation at all.This just adds insult to injury".