£1.8m Barnsley bins boost in bid to cut delays and improve safety
According to the council, catching up took much longer than had been hoped due to changes to the waste service as part of the authority's recent safety inititative.This was prompted by a coroner's recommendations following the death of a waste operative in another part of the country.In the last three years, 70 collisions in Barnsley had involved waste vehicles, a spokesperson for the authority said.Its Be Safe, Work Safe, Target Zero initiative had made crews work slower, but had reduced the number of avoidable accidents, they added.
'Build resilience'
Higginbottom said the council must remain "absolutely focused and committed" to health and safety."It's absolutely heartbreaking that elsewhere in the country people have lost their lives working in waste and recycling," Mr Higginbottom added."We won't be complacent or risk the welfare of our employees or the public."Meanwhile, the council said it was investing in technology in waste vehicles which would supply "real-time data and insights" on missed collections, blocked roads and other issues.It said it had also proposed that new brown and blue bins be supplied to residents in an effort to save individuals money on upsizing or replacing old bins.That would also result in additional income for the council from the government's recycling incentive schemes, the spokesperson said.Cabinet members would be asked at a meeting on 28 May to approve the £1.8m investment to "support, rebalance and build resilience into the service so rounds can be completed at the end of each day", they added.Higginbottom said: "I'm delighted to support this investment which will help make sure our staff remain safe at work while also making sure residents receive the waste collection service they expect and deserve."
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Charlie Nunn, the chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, which runs Britain's biggest car finance lender, Black Horse, has denied the scandal was on the same level as PPI. 'Some 80 per cent of people need finance to buy a new car, and a large number of second-hand car buyers do as well,' he told The Times in January. 'We need a well-functioning motor finance industry that supports consumers.' The National Franchised Dealers Association, a trade body, told the Supreme Court that 'nobody goes to a car dealer with a reasonable expectation that it is acting without self-interest in relation to any of the products it sells'. The Supreme Court's judgment could have been the difference between lenders facing a compensation bill of £11 billion — for complaints about a specific form of commission — and £29 billion, according to Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets, an investment bank. It could also have led to compensation claims about the sale of other financial products such as insurance where commission was involved but not properly disclosed. Consumers in turn could have had to foot the bill. Stuart Masson, the editor of the advice website The Car Expert UK, said that if lenders have to pay compensation to millions of people, car finance could get more expensive in the future as the industry tries to 'claw back' that money. 'That's not money they're going to find down the back of the sofa,' he told the BBC. 'They're going to have to get that back from increasing the costs of future lending, which won't just be on car finance. It could be on credit cards, it could be on personal loans, it could be on mortgages.' In January Reeves told bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: 'There is nothing pro-consumer about making it harder for people to buy an affordable car for their family.' 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The FCA began its investigation in January last year on whether consumers had been properly told about the link between their repayments and the commission. The investigation was kicked off by two rulings by the ombudsman against Lloyds and Barclays last year, which ordered the banks to refund two consumers more than £1,000 each. The FCA is expected to set out its next steps, including whether there will be a redress scheme, within six weeks. Any scheme would be free and easy for consumers to use, it said, while the FOS is also free for consumers to appeal to. Rob Lilley-Jones from the consumer group Which? said: 'It's vital that finance firms are held accountable for mis-selling and if a large number of motorists are eligible for compensation consumers are likely to be bombarded with ads from claims firms offering to take on their case. 'Affected customers should be careful when enlisting the services of claims management companies as the wrong choice could lead to their case being poorly handled, losing a significant portion of the compensation in legal fees — or both.' Coby Benson from the law firm Bott & Co, which helped win the ombudsman's case against Lloyds, said the experience from PPI was that consumers could sometimes recover more money by going to court than through a redress scheme. He said: 'We would support a proactive redress scheme if it fairly compensated consumers. But we have doubts over the effective implementation of a scheme, because our data shows that about half of clients have a different address now to that which the lender had from the time of the agreement.'
