Stockport Council has received thousands of complaints about missed bin collections after a £59 garden waste charge was introduced in May.

The charge was brought in as part of the town hall's last budget, along with making blue bin collections for paper waste once a month rather than fortnightly as it was previously.

But the changes appear to have had an impact on bin collection rates, as well as the council seeing a 'slight' drop in recycling rates according to figures from a new report.

The council said the changes don't seem to have led to 'significantly more material ending up in our black bins.'

The issues were discussed during a meeting at the town hall on November 27.

Reports of missed bin collections peaked in June with 'around 2,300 cases' the council said, adding that the changes to bins 'caused some confusion among residents and required crews to work unfamiliar rounds'.

The council said the numbers of complaints about missed bin collections have been falling each month since then, and that it collects more than one million bins every month overall.

Figures in the report showed bin collection failures have gone up from around 55 missed collections per 100,000 bins, to 140 failures per the same amount.

Cllr Jake Austin, Stockport council's cabinet member for housing and environment, pointed out the rate of missed collections is just 0.14 per cent of all 100,000 collections that happen in an area.

Blue bin collections in Stockport are now once per month (Image - Nub News)

The council's report stated: 'The recycling rate will fall significantly during 2025/26 due to a reduction in the amount of garden waste sent for composting.

'The reduction is due in part to the exceptionally dry summer limiting garden growth which has resulted in lower collection weights across all of GM.

'In addition, not all residents have continued with garden waste collections since the permits were introduced.

'Most residents have opted to continue to recycle their garden waste via the new chargeable service, however, other residents will have chosen alternative approaches including 225 households who have taken advantage of the subsidised home compost bin this financial year.'

Cllr Austin added: "We have confidence that this [bin collection rates] will improve over time and we are already starting to see that be the case after some of the disruptions that we've had following the change of routes and new people being on those routes.

"The staff are getting to know the routes better now they've been on them for a while so that is helping to make sure missed collections are happening less frequently.

"That being said, garden waste in particular is now a charge-able service, so we're expecting more scrutiny from members and residents who are having their bins collected, so they are quite rightly expecting a very high level service and are reporting more often when a service is missed."

Mark Glynn, director of place management at the council, added: "The fact that blue bins are now collected every four-weekly means that anybody who previously had a missed collection would wait until next time now cannot.

"In the future, we would expect to probably have more reports than we previously had, but we need to stabilise after all the changes that we brought in."

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