Thank you to Torbay residents for your patience with ongoing delays to recycling collections.

If you have not yet had your recycling collected on time, please can you continue to leave it out and our crews from SWISCo will collect it as soon as possible.

There is still a national driver shortage and although Torbay Council and SWISCo are still working hard to recruit more drivers and increase capacity locally, this week unfortunately we have lost two drivers, one who has resigned and another who is having to isolate.

SWISCo has recruited one new driver and is working to build driver capacity by providing training for staff who are not currently LGV drivers to take their test and qualify. We are also in the process of developing a new Driver Academy for training new drivers, while SWISCo supervisors are also currently driving vehicles where appropriate to help relieve some of the delays.

There will also be a new smaller recycling vehicle in service by October, which does not require an LGV driver and will assist collections in roads with narrow access.

Mike Morey, Cabinet Member for Environment, Infrastructure and Culture said: “Once again we apologise to residents for the ongoing issues with recycling collections that we are experiencing in common with many other councils across the country. We are making progress in recruiting more drivers but we are still a significant number of drivers down – ideally we need around 40 drivers to cover all the shifts and holidays and at the moment we only have just over 30, so we still have quite a long way to go.”

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