North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC)

Failure demand affects all councils and is costing millions, creates rework, repeat contacts, complaints, investigation and harms the reputation of all councils.
The busiest services across councils are the hardest hit i.e. waste and neighbourhood services. Understanding failure demand and gaining clear insight into the causes and the impact is difficult and there is no recognised government platform that enables this.
For NELC a missed bin which is revisited following a missed bin report, this can cost up to £118 and where a complaint is made, investigated and escalated to a stage 2 can cost in excess of this. For 2017/18 we had 5,400 missed bin reports at an estimated average cost of £14.84 per report.
We want to take our ‘missed bin’ prototype solution to an Alpha product that can be shared across many councils and wish to collaborate with any councils wanting to address these challenges:
• Deliver an interrogable dashboard
• Make spatial analysis available
• Analyse by cause
• Analyse by ward, round and crew
• Analyse by waste type
• Identify repeat offenders to enable education and enforcement
• Enable operational and strategic management decision making
• Improve customer service
• Take a proactive approach to service delivery first time, on time, every time

Discovery evidence

We undertook a 12 week discovery of waste failure demand and reflected back in regular show and tells what we did, heard, found and developed a prototype:
• looked at the end to end process
• spent time with customer services, waste management and operatives and business support
• Spoke with members and residents.
• Found decreased staff morale when constantly dealing with complaints and negative local media
• Negative media has exacerbated public ill feeling about moving to fortnightly collections
• Only 23% of missed bins are reported on-line
• Missed bins has highest volume of customer contacts as a service across the council (450 per month average)
• 671 corporate complaints, 39% of which related to missed bins
• Cost for, rework, handling reports and investigating complaints are expensive
• Large increase in the number of withdrawn missed bin reports since move to fortnightly collections
• As a paid service, green waste is more pressured to get collection correct
• As a council that we miss collections we should not i.e. assisted collections
• Lots of ad-hoc data requests and no opportunity for teams to self-serve
• Lack of data regarding why bins are missed so actions can’t be identified to tackle root cause of the problem
https://share.nelincs.gov.uk/the-local-digital-fund/
Username-LDDNEL
Password-SDNEL