Old Birmingham bin lorries to be replaced in £12m scheme

The city council cabinet agreed the proposal earlier this week for a programme including around 250 vehicles in total.

Bins boss Councillor John O’Shea said the ageing fleet was hurting collections performance and costing significant amounts of money in repairs.

He also said the replacement programme will ‘re-profile’ the fleet including more of the smaller-type wagons better suited to congested and narrow streets.

The new vehicles will also meet the Euro 6 diesel benchmark required for the Clean Air Zone, whilst alternative power sources such as electric vehicles will be explored.

“These vehicles do have a very hard working life and take a bit of a battering on our streets,” said Councillor O’Shea.

“We have significant costs in maintaining this ageing fleet and that’s providing problems to the service we are providing residents.”

High numbers of bin lorries breaking down has often been blamed for poor performance in the waste collection service, which currently is missing hundreds of collections a week.

Former bins chief Councillor Majid Mahmood argued it was the ‘main reason the service was failing’ in April as he tried to block an independent review of the waste service, which could recommend outsourcing it.

While a response to a written question at this month’s full council revealed that just one of Birmingham’s four depots saw 34 breakdowns in May – more than one a day.

The cabinet approved the fleet replacement strategy on Tuesday.

Over the period 2019/20 to the end of 2021/22 it will see around 64 new refuse collection vehicles, 20 trade waste vehicles, 143 street cleansing vehicles and 20 other assets such as cars and vans.

The exact numbers may change and the council will acquire the new fleet through a mix of outright purchase, hiring and leasing.

Councillor Rob Alden, leader of the Conservative opposition group, agreed that ageing bin lorries were hurting council performance but he criticised the council for bringing the replacement proposal as a ‘late report’ published less than 24 hours before the meeting.

The official ‘reason for urgency’ was stated as ‘vehicle issues are having a significant impact’ on service performance.

Councillor Alden described the move as ‘farcical’ and added: “No-one disagrees that the vehicles are having a massive issue on the ability of the service to operate properly and no-one disagrees that that is an absolute priority for the city but the administration has known this for years.”

In response Councillor O’Shea said: “The urgency is largely around the cost of not doing this, there is a significant cost to us of not replacing these in terms of maintenance and ongoing repairs as well as the impact on the service.”

Liberal Democrat group leader Councillor Jon Hunt questioned how the replacement programme would be impacted by the outcome of the independent review, which is due back in the autumn.

Councillor O’Shea said: “We are not pre-emptying the outcome of that report in the autumn but the problem is we can’t wait for that, and certainly were a decision taken to outsource the service, I do stress it’s by no means decided, that would be a two or three-year process to outsource it, we simply cannot wait.”