We are upgrading our revenues and benefits back office system and forms which will be down from Sunday evening. This means our teams will not be able to respond to detailed council tax, benefits and business rates enquiries on Monday. We expect full service to resume from Tuesday morning following final testing - we will remove this mesage when the system upgrade is complete. Thank you for your understanding.

Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding this week.

Due to the exceptionally hot weather and health alerts, we had to make some difficult decisions to protect our crews. To help minimise disruption, crews started work at 5am, we suspended recycling collections on Thursday and we cancelled garden waste collections on Thursday and Friday, so we could prioritise black bins. This is because uncollected household waste, particularly in extreme heat, can present a health risk.

Our crews work long shifts, walk more than 12 miles a day and spend much of their time working behind hot collection vehicles with little access to shade. Heat stroke is a very real risk and, in line with national HSE guidance, we took the decision to cancel some collections to safeguard staff wellbeing.

If your recycling bin or bags were missed on Thursday 25 June

Please leave them out from Monday 29 June.
We will aim to return and empty them at some point between Monday and Friday next week.

If your garden waste bin was missed on Thursday 25 June or Friday 26 June

Please take it back in and present it on your next scheduled collection day.
We recognise that garden waste is a paid-for service and we are sorry for the inconvenience caused.
To make up for the missed collections, we will provide an additional garden waste collection later this year.

We would like to thank residents for their support and understanding while we balanced service delivery with the need to keep our crews safe during this period of extreme weather - find out more.

We are in contact with all known rough sleepers in the district to encourage them into accommodation during the current weather conditions, as part of our severe weather emergency protocol, which is now active. If you are concerned about a rough sleeper who you feel needs help, please call us on 01543 308000 or outside of office hours call 01527 406643. Find out more about our severe weather emergency protocol.

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