A bigger boy did it and ran away

There is a particular sort of British institutional failure in which absolutely everybody is responsible for something, nobody is responsible for anything, and the only person who can be confidently identified as having done something wrong is a bloke in Liverpool who nicked our bin lorries. Which makes a change from our cars (I jest, I like Scousers, they banned the S*n).

Anyway – welcome back to East Suffolk Council's bin-derived shit show.

On Thursday evening, the council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee assembled to examine the complete catastrophe known as Better Recycling. Three hours later, we had learned that the bins hadn't been emptied, that this was regrettable, and that a variety of people, meteorological phenomena and possibly woodland mammals were responsible.

The meeting was chaired by Labour's Cllr Deacon, a pleasant man whose apparent determination not to trouble the witnesses with anything resembling sustained interrogation was admirable in its consistency.

Before him sat an motley collection of senior officers, executives and councillors. A small corporate civilisation: a bumbling army of frankly, idiotically behaved types. Add together the annual salaries of those involved in the programme, including the chief executive and the conspicuously absent bin tsar, and I suspect we are comfortably approaching £1 million a year.

A million pounds. Every year. To organise the movement of rubbish from houses to a tip.

But this is apparently harder than it looks.

The evening's principal revelation was that Liverpool had bought many bin lorries. This meant East Suffolk couldn't have the bin lorries it wanted.

A city 250 miles away had somehow defeated the administrative machinery of East Suffolk District Council.

I rather admire Liverpool. They've got a proud maritime history, wonderful music and a commendable attitude towards dreadful newspapers. Now they can add the destruction of East Suffolk's waste collection timetable to their achievements.

Although, presumably, somebody might have checked whether the lorries were actually available before reorganising the entire service.

But that would be scrutiny. And we weren't really doing scrutiny. This is, after all, the administration that is right now, dear reader, spending somewhere like half a million pounds of your money moving rocks from a beach into storage.

Instead, we were doing explanations, excuses – and reasons.

There were explanations about the heat. The telephone calls. The emails. The queues at waste transfer stations. The lorries being too small, or too big, or arriving too late, or being in Liverpool. The price of fuel, which has apparently only recently been found to be very expensive. It's OK though – you are paying for it.

There was even a discussion about how successfully badgers could open food waste caddies, and precisely how those caddies should be positioned to discourage them.

At one surreal moment, an officer compared the bin rollout to the opening of Heathrow's fifth terminal.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of residents had experienced missed food waste collections. The council's own review records that 82.1 per cent of households suffered at least one disruption during June and July. One unfortunate household waited 70 days.

Seventy days.

You could walk to Liverpool, collect a bin lorry and drive it back in less time.

Cllr Paul Ashton, deputy leader and seemingly the only politician present who genuinely understood the machinery of this disaster, is by trade a project manager. One who managed project managers who managed project managers, and delivered his explanations with the composure of a man who has spent months excusing the complete ineptitude of the rest of the gaggle.

He was persuasive. Almost reassuring. Which is a remarkable achievement given the evidence – he's also clearly the de facto leader of East Suffolk Council now – as the real leader has checked out, and is on the beach.

Cllr Sally Noble, the Green cabinet member responsible for the environment, and for spending over £300,000 on different coloured bin lids, appeared rather less comfortable. Watching her navigate the operational detail was like watching somebody attempt to assemble a wardrobe using instructions for a particularly complicated tent.

Labour's Cllr Gooch contributed questions about lessons learned. Lessons are terribly important in local government. They are what you learn after something has gone wrong, so that you can explain having learned them when it goes wrong again.

Cllr Nimney (Lib Dems) appeared understandably concerned that parish councils had been left wondering what on earth was happening.

Cllr Molyneaux (Greens) offered contributions of such exquisite, honey-coated deference that one wondered whether he had accidentally wandered into a poorly attended local events ceremony.

Conservative Cllr Lynch at least seemed determined to extract something approaching accountability. Unfortunately, determination and success are different things.

The managing director of East Suffolk Services Limited, meanwhile, appeared particularly unhappy with the press coverage.

The press had apparently been unkind.

I thought, under the circumstances, the media had been extraordinarily restrained. She failed, though, to discuss how the PPE contract for the rollout had been awarded to her brother-in-law. Maybe she is keeping that back for the next meeting. Or not...

When a public body fails to provide a basic service for weeks, the principal problem is not that newspapers have noticed. It is that the public body has failed to provide the service.

Our esteemed MP for Suffolk Coastal loomed into view yesterday on one of her remarkably transparent data and popularity-gathering missions with 10 questions. One mention in the Commons, and one short clip in which she appeared to be resembling a drunk Aunt Sally yesterday, won't turn the tide of indifference in her favour. She has a number of Cllr colleagues at East Suffolk, but not a sniff of genuine opposition or scrutiny has been apparent.

And let me return to the leader, Cllr Caroline Topping.

Once the Greens' candidate for the Norfolk and Suffolk mayoralty, she now gives the impression of someone increasingly exasperated by the business of governing. Leadership requires more than occupying the chair while other people explain why things happened.

And what an elaborate enterprise this was.

Committees, programme boards, officers, consultants, contractors, political oversight. All assembled to reorganise collections, introduce a food waste recycling scheme that had reasonably happily been introduced throughout the rest of Suffolk, and reduce the ordinary working pattern from five days to four.

And somehow nobody sufficiently anticipated what would happen when the lorries arrived late, the disposal sites became congested, and the rounds failed.

The financial consequences remain the most interesting unanswered question.

We already know £164,400 in additional specialist and customer service staffing costs. The full bill has yet to be established. It could conceivably approach seven figures.

Yet three hours of supposed scrutiny failed to produce the comprehensive financial reckoning residents deserve.

How much? Who authorised it? Who knew? When did they know? And who, ultimately, carries responsibility?

These aren't particularly sophisticated questions.

They're the questions you ask when somebody has spent your money and failed to empty your bin.

Towards the end, Labour leader Cllr Byatt came the closest to offering some scrutiny in the traditional sense of the meaning by telling Cllr Topping the buck stops with her. That, though, fell on cloth ears.

But indeed it does.

Not with Liverpool. Not with the weather. Not with the badgers. Not with Heathrow's newest terminal.

With the people elected and paid to run East Suffolk Council.

The council says recycling performance has improved. Good. It should have done. That was the point of the exercise.

But improved recycling figures cannot retrospectively transform administrative failure into triumph.

The public will find themselves paying for the shambles twice. Once through the taxes that funded the failure, and again through the taxes needed to repair it.

And all because a bigger boy in Liverpool apparently took the lorries and ran away.

There is an election in May. You'd like to think that the electorate will provide the scrutiny needed now, as spring turns into summer 2027. But who the Dickens else are you going to vote for?

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