Council to take over bin collections from Amey

Members of the council’s cabinet agreed to authorise setting up the Local Authority Trading Company (LATC), which, from February 2019 will operate the services currently provided by Amey.

Along with bin collections, services to be taken over by the council include street cleaning, park maintenance and home to school transport.

However, the move will cost the authority £810,000 to extend Amey’s contract a further six months - as the contract was due to end in August.

, Labour councillor Ed Murphy hit out at the added costs.

He said: “This extra cost to council tax payers, should have been avoided and would have been had a proper plan been adopted earlier. It’s last minute bumbling again from an incompetent Conservative administration.”

Council leader cllr John Holdich said “In essence, the LATC takes over, in a like-for-like procedure, the management and day-to-day running of all the services previously contained in the contract. “These services are important to the people of Peterborough because they represent first-hand, in a very visual way, the effects of the work that we do for them. Everybody likes to see a clean city, well maintained, parks and buildings clean, refuge collected properly.”

Cllr Holdich confirmed the 402 employees working for Amey would be transferred to the LATC - and said there was the possibility of more jobs being created in the future.