Cllr Jackie Brown with local resident Gemma Cameron who raised the initial issue

Following a request from Otley Town Councillor for Manor Ward Cllr Jackie Brown, who responding to local Bridge St resident Gemma Cameron and other residents, raised the continuing saga where some streets in Otley get a brown bin service and others don’t.

So I asked the question …….

Councillor S Lay – When will brown bin provision be expanded in Otley?

Reply – As it stands we have rolled out garden waste collections to all identified appropriate households in the city that can be accessed with a standard (26 tonne) refuse collection vehicle.

To date we have not delivered the service to any properties that are serviced using non-standard (smaller or narrower) collection vehicles. The properties in Otley that do not have collections fall into this cohort. In addition properties on bag collections for black or green collections are not able to be provided with the service as the service is undertaken using a wheeled bin.
There are approximately 15,000-20,000 properties on these two types of collections; however it is likely that a large proportion of these will not have gardens, e.g. high rise and communal properties.

The service has very limited capacity on routes with non-standard vehicles, and a very limited number of these smaller vehicles. As it stands the service has no budget for additional vehicles to roll-out any further services. Any expansion of garden waste collections would therefore need to be done using existing capacity on routes.

The latest phase of fortnightly collections has been rolled out to those properties serviced by these smaller vehicles. This has released a very small amount of capacity into the service, however there is not enough capacity to cover all the properties who would be eligible for a garden waste collection. At present we therefore have no plans to roll-out the service any further.