Ealing's bins, street cleaning and parks deal with its own company now runs to July 2035. Scrutiny voted on 22 October not to send it back to Cabinet.

Greener Ealing will keep collecting Ealing’s bins, sweeping its streets and looking after its parks until July 2035. Opposition councillors tried to send the decision back for a rethink, but the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee voted on Thursday night to let it stand.

Cabinet agreed the five-year extension on 7 October. It runs from 7 July 2030, when the current contract ends, to 6 July 2035. Cabinet chose to extend rather than run a competitive tender.

What was decided

Greener Ealing Limited (GEL) is a company wholly owned by the council. It took over from a private contractor in July 2020. The Cabinet report says the contract covers:

  • household waste and recycling collections
  • street cleansing
  • grounds maintenance and parks
  • burials
  • graffiti and fly-tipping removal, added in September 2023
  • parking enforcement, added in April 2024

The report gave Cabinet three options: let the contract end in 2030, run a competitive tender, or extend. Officers recommended the extension. They said an independent “shadow bid” assessment found no “sufficiently compelling value for money or service case” for replacing GEL. They also said a tender would bring procurement costs and a risk of disruption during any handover.

Cabinet agreed the extension as recommended. The shadow bid itself is exempt from publication, so residents cannot read it.

The published report puts no figure on the value of the contract. It says detailed financial schedules “will be subject to review and verification by finance prior to publication of the final report”.

Why it was called in

All 13 Liberal Democrat councillors and all five Conservatives signed a call-in request. They estimated the extension at “potentially worth £150m over five years”. That is their estimate; the council has not published one.

Their main objections were:

  • No competition. They said it was “highly unusual” for an extension this large to be agreed without a tender.
  • The cost of new vehicles. GEL’s fleet is due for renewal by 2028. They argued the shadow bid barely looked at what that would cost council tax payers.
  • Missed assisted collections. These are pick-ups for residents who cannot move their own bins. The target is zero, and they said GEL has missed it every year since 2020, with the figure stuck at around ten.
  • Leaves and fly-tipping. They said autumn leaf clearing has been cut back since 2020 and fly-tipped rubbish is not cleared quickly enough.
  • The Broadway Living precedent. The council’s housing company is being wound down. They said GEL, another council-owned company, needed closer scrutiny of its finances.

What was said on Thursday

The committee met at Perceval House on 22 October, and the meeting was streamed on the council’s YouTube channel.

Cllr Jonathan Oxley (Liberal Democrat, Hanger Hill) presented the call-in. “This is not an ideological debate,” he said. “We don’t object in principle to services being delivered by a local authority owned company like GEL, provided it performs well and it offers value for money.” He called GEL’s performance “distinctly average” and the value assessment “backward-looking”.

Cllr Dominic Moffitt, the Cabinet member for climate action, disputed that the process was non-competitive and said the committee’s job was to test how the decision was taken, not GEL itself. He said the shadow bid cost about £12,000, while a full tender “may have cost more than ten times as much”. He said the length of the extension was largely about planning the purchase of new vehicles.

He also said complaints had fallen from around 3,000 a year under the previous private contractor to fewer than 200 in 2023. The council’s own February 2026 report to the same committee put it differently: a monthly average of around 170 complaints before GEL, down to single figures in recent years.

The chair, Cllr Anthony Kelly, then put the question. The committee decided not to send the decision back to Cabinet. Votes were taken by a show of hands and the numbers were not read out.

The council’s case on performance

The February report gives the figures the council relies on. It says:

  • Ealing has the third lowest cost per resident in London for waste disposal, recycling and trade waste, at £20.47 a head
  • it is eleventh lowest for street cleansing, at £31.22 a head
  • it has the lowest parks and open spaces cost per head of any London borough, on 2022/23 figures
  • the recycling rate rose from 47.6% to 49.5%, second in London behind Bromley
  • GEL has made more than £1.5m of efficiency savings for the council since 2021

What it means for you

Nothing changes on your doorstep. Your bin day, your collections and who you report problems to all stay the same. Check your day on our Ealing bin collection days page.

What the decision does settle is who runs these services for the next nine years. Changes due in that time, including the national rules on what households must recycle and the move to new, lower-emission vehicles, will now be made with GEL rather than through a new contract.

If a collection is missed, report it to the council online. If you need an assisted collection because you cannot move your bin, you can apply through the council’s rubbish and recycling pages.

The decision now takes effect. Draft minutes of Thursday’s meeting have not yet been published.

Sources