This Wednesday’s Ward Committee ended up with three main agenda items.

The quickest to be dealt with was the approval of the first of the coming year’s Community Chest bids (as listed in my note on the meeting on Monday).

More time was spent in discussion with Kerry Jukes, from National Express West Midlands who attended to respond to questions about the ongoing problem of busses queuing in Summer Road in the early evening, as they wait to park up for the night in the Bus Garage. Rather surprisingly, as the new local manager, Kerry seemed to be unaware of the problem, but she is certianly aware of it now. She promised to see what she could do to sort it out and report back. Should you need to contact her on this or any other issue, you can call her on 0121 254 7929 or email her on kerry.jukes@nationalexpress.com

There was also a presentation by Jeremy Shields from Fleet and Waste Management, about the planned move to ward based refuse collection. This will mean that one crew collects all the black bags from one ward, unlike now where the collection routes for any one crew can cover two or three wards. This is being done to improve street cleansing (currently around 80% of street cleansing is done soon after the refuse collection, this move will make it easier to up this percentage), and improve the accountability of the crews – there will be no doubt about which crew is responsible for each home in the City and this should help reduce the numbers of missed collections. These are already rare, but do occur from time to time, especially on the boundaries of routes. The changes are being piloted in Sheldon and Stechford & Yardley North Wards and if all goes well will be rolled out to the rest of the City in the summer. The biggest issue is likely to be informing those households who will have a new collection day. Most homes in Acocks Green will keep the same day but there will be some changes. Green bag collection and recyclate collections will continue to take place on the same day as the black bags are collected, whether this changes or not.

As soon as the details for the the move to ward based refuse collection are announced, I’ll post them here. In the meantime the good news is that a settlement has been reached, in the dispute between the Council and the refuse collectors, so the strikes we saw over Christmas will not be repeated.