I’d like to apologise for the garden waste service that for the previous eight months has fallen below all of our expectations. The reasons are well known and I have regularly and directly communicated with subscribers via email or letter over that period keeping everyone informed of our progress to resuming a normal fortnightly service.
I’m delighted and relieved to say that normal fortnightly collections will resume from week commencing the 18th April alongside the recycling bins, and week commencing the 25th April alongside the rubbish bins.
An email or letter will be sent to all subscribers shortly detailing this. A total of 13 collections were suspended and subscriptions are being extended to reflect this. A further email or letter will be sent once this operation has been completed giving all subscribers notification of their new renewal date.
As a subscriber myself, I’m certainly glad we have managed to resume this service as the growing season takes hold. I thank everyone for their patience while we resolved the challenges presented to us, and I’m extremely grateful that we managed to maintain the food, recycling and residual (black) collection services during this period.
The Heathlands councillors will be holding a surgery at Brookwood Memorial Halls on Saturday 5th February at 11:00 for an hour. This is part of a series of surgeries across the ward.
All three of us expect to be there but occasionally there may be reasons why any one of us is unable.
We’ll be in the small hall and will be following the Covid guidelines at the time of the event.
As you should know if you are a garden waste subscriber, our winter collection plan is in operation and we are collecting in Woking this week and next.
We started yesterday and we are collecting much more than we were expecting. We were expecting a big uplift in the tonnage, but today it was around 60 tonnes which required additional trips to the processing site. The crews are doing a great job trying to keep up.
The net result was a few roads were not completed, and they will be first on the list for tomorrow. I expect this pattern to continue during the week and I’m currently working with Joint Waste Solutions and Amey to have a Saturday collection in operation to mop up anything missed this week.
Please bear with us and if your green bin isn’t collected when you were expecting it to be, please leave it out as the plan is that it will be collected the next day.
This will be the last collection for this year, and I will be writing to all subscribers in January when I know exactly when the next collection will occur.
We still have a high degree of confidence that the service will be back to normal mid to late spring next year.
Back in September when it became obvious that the national HGV driver shortage was going to impact our options to provide a full garden waste collection, we started to look at what we could achieve with the resources available to us.
By the end of September, we were fairly confident that by working with out partner boroughs in the Joint Waste Solutions area a reduced winter service would be feasible, operating every other month in each borough. Not ideal, but better than nothing, and at the same time we were able to announce am extension of all current subscriptions by six months as some form of acknowledgement of the disruption caused.
We operated an October collection, and I am very happy to announce today that we will be operating the next collection in Woking borough week commencing 22nd November for the two weeks through to December. That gives people the opportunity to have the autumn leaf fall taken away.
Your collection will be the same as it always has been. If your garden waste is collected on the blue week, it will be collected alongside your recycling, and if it is collected on the black week, it will be collected alongside your residual.
The future is looking more positive, and by continuing to follow our winter plan, we expect to run a January collection service, probably towards the end of the month. We’re still on track to get back to service normality mid to late Spring.
Of course, things can change and we will keep everyone up to date on where we are, together with sufficient notice of when a collection will take place. Letters and emails will begin to be sent out shortly confirming this latest collection.
Tomorrow evening the Leader of the Council Cllr Azad, CEO of Woking Borough Council Julie Fisher and a member of the Executive will be appearing at an evening roadshow where you can go along and have your say on the Council’s future priorities.
The event will take place at the Holy Trinity Church, Chobham Road, Knaphill, GU21 2SX. You’ll need to book in advance and the link may be found below, together with the other dates and locations planned.
As you are aware the national shortage of HGV drivers has been impacting our waste and recycling services. The situation has not improved so unfortunately the garden waste service will be suspended in Woking and Mole Valley from Monday 16 August until Friday 27 August.
We are working with our partners in the joint collection contract to manage this issue and avoid anyone missing two consecutive garden waste collections. Taking this approach means that our service will restart from 30 August while services are then suspended for two weeks in Elmbridge and Surrey Heath.
We are trying to figure out at this stage whether we have a long term or medium term problem and work is ongoing to assess all possible options for future service delivery. We will then review these with the other boroughs to determine the best approach going forward.
We are again writing to all subscribers to keep them up to date but using email where possible to keep costs down. Again, the garden waste subscription will be extended to compensate for missed collections. Please keep an eye on the service updates from JWS and it’s worth checking this the night before your usual collection day: https://www.jointwastesolutions.org/service-updates/woking/
It’s not a situation we want to be in, and I apologise that we can’t collect green waste as frequently as we want to.
Very quick update to my previous post to say that all garden waste subscriptions have been extended by a fortnight.
We’re also working with the other boroughs in the Joint Waste Solutions partnership to try and ensure the service is reinstated for the next scheduled collection.
You may have read about the HGV driver issue that is hitting areas of business nationwide. A combination of factors has meant that the Council’s waste contractor is unable to field enough drivers to make all the waste rounds this coming week.
The decision has been made to prioritise the residual (black bin) and recycling (blue bins) ahead of garden waste. This means that there will be no collections of garden waste this coming week, so please do not put your bin out. We expect to continue to struggle across the summer period.
Amey has a driver promotion scheme, but has been unable to get any new drivers promoted due to the lack of HGV testing going on over the past 16 months. With current drivers taking their summer holidays, and the lack of HGV drivers in the market, it has meant we’ve been impacted.
Recently Traveller ponies have been grazing on land within the country park running along side the canal in Brookwood. Whilst this location is preferable to other areas the ponies have been grazing recently, it’s still illegal grazing.
I’ve been working with officers to achieve a licensing scheme that will enable a different field in that area that has road access via the A322 to be used for ponies. This work is ongoing.
What is beyond unacceptable is the driving of vehicles along the foot path to access the ponies. The path has not been designed for vehicles, the two bridges are not maintained and may not hold up structurally to vehicles and it’s clearly dangerous to other users of the path.
I met up with officers yesterday to work out the best way of preventing the vehicle access. This is urgently being addressed and I should see the plans by the end of the week. I expect solid posts will be installed in the middle of the path at the entrance by the pavilion at the Knaphill end, and also from the canal. These will likely be wood, with sufficient reflective markings to prevent collisions. Access will still be possible for double width buggies.
An application for housing on the Coblands site was submitted several years ago and went nowhere other than for some consultees to submit some comments, particularly around drainage. After the Traveller site was granted permission in February, I received notification that the existing housing application had been withdrawn.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and a new application has been submitted and subsequently validated. The application is PLAN/2021/0248 and is for the demolition of the four houses and the building of 128 residential units. All houses are two storeys, with four small apartment blocks that are three storeys.
The image below gives a good impression of what is being proposed.
The site will deliver 64 affordable units, with 20 of those being for sale, and the remaining 44 for rent. This is precisely 50% which is better than the amount suggested in the WBC Core Strategy.
The remaining 64 units will be sold at the market price, and effectively these will support the affordable units, as well as make contributions to the road network that needs some work by the crossroads.
I think the design and access statement is worth reading as it gives a good overview of what is being proposed and can be accessed through the planning portal using PLAN/2021/0248 as the search string.
There will be play areas, each house will have a garden and there will be space for residents of the flats to access.
Parking wise, there are more parking spaces than there are units with 197 spaces planned. Will this be enough? Probably not, but then again, the more parking provided, the more cars it seems to attract. Each unit will have a space, with some of the larger houses having more than one space.
The units will be highly sustainable and will probably be far more efficient than most of the housing stock in the village.
Is it perfect? Not quite. Is it a good use of the site? Absolutely and I am very much in support of it as it achieves things people have spoken to me about over the past few years; namely the prevention of the Traveller site expanding across the entire site, the building of a lot of affordable homes (the majority of which are one and two bedroomed), and improvements to the crossroads.
The crossroads are not part of the application as that is in train elsewhere through the Joint Committee process. The other area being worked on is the concept of the ‘local first’ priority order which is also not part of the planning application. These two issues I will continue to pursue.
Overall I’m glad this has finally made it to planning and I hope it goes through so we can finally get the whole site stable.
Cllr Kevin Davis 