Exeter’s Labour Party first promised the introduction of a citywide food waste collection in the run-up to the 2016 local elections, eight years ago.
Three years passed. Then in July 2019 the party announced it would be bringing forward “bold new plans” for a kerbside collection scheme that would include food waste and glass too.
Council leader Phil Bialyk said the proposal was “another example of Labour delivering for Exeter”.
The council duly approved the plans later that year, which included a budget of £1.5 million to enhance the council’s Exton Road Materials Reclamation Facility (MRF) in order to deliver the scheme.
An accompanying report confirmed that collections would not commence until 2021 at the earliest.
Exeter Labour summer 2019 campaign leaflet
Eighteen more months passed. In the run-up to the 2021 local elections Labour again announced that it was preparing to deliver on its by then five year-old promise.
However two months after the ballot the council changed course completely, scrapping its plans to introduce kerbside collections altogether. The primary reason appears to be that it hadn’t realised that the new collection vehicles that were required might be too big for Exeter’s streets.
Instead it decided to retain its existing fortnightly waste and recycling collections and bolt a weekly food waste collection on the side.
Another £2.7 million was added to the project budget, bringing the total to £4.1 million.
Exeter Citizen Autumn 2019 front cover headline
The food waste collection service finally began in November 2021 with a round of 1,300 households in Alphington. More Alphington households were added in early 2022.
In March that year the council realised that delivering the scheme would require reconfiguration of the MRF, including the creation of food waste storage bays, which would require major investment.
Labour’s 2022 local elections manifesto nevertheless promised to continue extending food waste collections across the city, but by the end of the year just 2,000 Beacon Heath and Pinhoe addresses had been added to the rounds.
Last year service delivery expansion finally gathered pace. By February this year collections from nearly 22,000 addresses were taking place, roughly a third of the city.
But the service had hit the buffers. Josie Parkhouse admitted that no new collections would be added until a new food bay was constructed at Exton Road.
The trouble was that the council had realised, two months earlier, that it would cost rather more than it previously realised to bring the MRF up to capacity to continue expanding the service.
Nearly £4 million more, bringing the total project cost to £8 million.
Exeter Labour 2024 campaign leaflet
At the time it said it would finance the scheme by selling assets.
Then, just five days before this year’s local elections campaign officially began, it convened an extraordinary general meeting to instead take £6 million from the Community Infrastructure Levy fund to pay for the scheme.
The decision meant that the community fund would be nearly wiped out.
The meeting took place just one month after the council’s 2024-25 annual budget was passed without the council leader mentioning MRF investment in his budget speech.
The budget line for the required upgrade was marked as to be financed by borrowing.
This year’s Labour local elections manifesto says “additional collections will be rolled out when a new food bay is constructed”.
It doesn’t mention the cost, or that the community fund now sits nearly empty.
Meanwhile Labour election leaflets being distributed in Alphington lead with the line that the money represents an £8 million investment in the ward.
