Council waste... and recycling: £30,000 for PR company

Councillor Jacqui Beswick with the new recycling bins

Rochdale Borough Council handed over £30,000 to a Manchester-based PR company to 'promote' the council’s controversial changes to the waste and recycling service as part of a £180,000 'behavioural change campaign'.

The Council has a highly paid Head of Communications heading up a number of well paid 'Communciations Officers' in its own PR department, however it appears the Council did not consider they had the 'skills' needed to promote the waste and recycling changes as Neil Maiver, Waste and Recycling Delivery Manager at Rochdale Borough Council, explained in answer to a Freedom of Information request: "Occasionally the council needs to employ organisations or individuals with specialist skills for short periods."

A spokesperson for Keep Rochdale Tidy, the group that campaigned to stop the plans going ahead, said of the use of outside PR consultants: “They [the Council] are quite notorious now for wasting millions on them and this appears to be just another example."

The new service has introduced collections to households in the borough in the following way:

• General waste bins (dark green bin) together with food and garden bins/caddies collected in week one.
• Mixed recycling bins (light green bin with a blue lid) together with food and garden bins/caddies collected in week two.
• Paper and card recycling bins (blue bin) together with food and garden bins/caddies collected in week three.