Ask most residents what services they get for their council tax and the first thing they say is their rubbish collected and their streets swept.

Well, last week Ealing Council let us all down badly.  Enterprise PLC, the new contractor, started on Monday last week and they just weren’t prepared. By Thursday they had just about collected from the roads they should have collected from on Monday. As of Easter Monday there was still waste, which should been collected the previous Tuesday.

We are told that staff were still being trained on the first Monday morning, so started late; that they did not have enough refuse lorries; many lorries were the wrong size for our narrow roads; and new lorries won’t be delivered for weeks.

If I had been Leader of the Council I would have made sure that the contractor was totally ready.  I would have checked and double-checked.  The current Council Leader needs to make sure that the service improves immediately and this fiasco never happens again.

Let’s not forget that this same Labour Council have negotiated the new contract to include the option to reduce all collections of waste and recycling to fortnightly.  And don’t let’s forget too that, despite thelargest petition ever presented to Ealing Council objecting to the £40 garden tax reducing collections to fortnightly, they went ahead with the garden tax anyway.

The Conservatives are proud of the legacy we left of a first class waste and recycling service that worked well.  The streets were swept and graffiti was all but eliminated.

We all want a clean environment, with clean streets, no litter, no graffiti, and rubbish and re-cycling collected regularly. We can’t go back to the bad old days before we sorted out the mess. The people of the borough deserve better.