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Following the announcement on Thursday 16th July that will see 134 councils reorganised into 38 unitary authorities, NAWDO are calling on the Government to expand options which ensure stability during the period of transition.
Local Government Reorganisation is happening at pace which is challenging for all authorities affected. Most Waste Disposal Authorities impacted currently face disaggregation as a default position.
Authorities are exploring robust shared service arrangements to avoid the risk of fragmenting long-standing systems and efficiencies at scale which residents across the country currently rely on. Local authority officers are working hard to avoid new unitary authorities facing ‘day one’ without viable disposal routes.
At the same time, NAWDO recognises that unitary models have the potential to successfully align responsibility for both collection and treatment. That means each council will directly benefit from all changes that reduce total-system costs and carbon, retaining and ideally growing the scale of treatment and disposal arrangements. LGR could become a catalyst for more efficient, lower-carbon waste systems.
In the short term, a hosted shared service model could be a pragmatic route to ensure continuity between old and new authorities on day one. To preserve the scale in the long-term, more options are needed. The ability to create Joint Waste Authorities was repealed nearly a decade ago, but this should now be reassessed. NAWDO would also like to see the acceleration of devolution and an option for unitary authorities to explore the delegation of waste management functions to new strategic authorities. This would keep the scale and stability needed for investment in the low carbon waste and recycling infrastructure of the future, and link with regional plans for developing the Circular Economy.
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