Councillors vote on 23 September on a council tax rebate over the Better Recycling rollout. On the council's own figures it is worth about 40p a household.

East Suffolk councillors vote on Wednesday 23 September on asking the council to hand back part of its council tax over the Better Recycling rollout.

On the council’s own published figures, the rebate would be worth about 40p a year to a Band D household, and about £39,800 across the whole district.

The motion is on the agenda for Wednesday’s Full Council meeting at the council’s Riverside offices in Lowestoft, starting at 6.30pm. It is proposed by Councillor Mark Jepson, leader of the Conservative group, and seconded by Councillor Peter Byatt, leader of the Labour group. The two opposition groups putting a motion down together is unusual in itself.

What the motion actually asks for

The wording matters, because it is narrower than it sounds. The motion’s single resolution asks the council to:

Ask Cabinet to consider providing a 0.2% rebate of the ESC portion of Council Tax to all East Suffolk council taxpayers when budget setting for 2027-28, in view of the disruption and frustration caused by the Better Recycling roll-out.

Two things follow from that. It is a request to Cabinet to consider a rebate, not a decision to pay one. And it is 0.2% of the East Suffolk Council share of the bill, not 0.2% of the bill itself.

The motion also sets out what councillors say went wrong. It records:

  • thousands of missed collections, undelivered bins and uncollected food waste
  • “teething problems” being used as an explanation to ward members raising complaints
  • a cabinet member’s remark that “Sadly it seems, some people do seem to like having something to be angry about”
  • the food caddy introduction having “experienced the highest level of failure”, with many residents saying they have stopped using it
  • a rollout that “has been plagued with operational and performance issues which has eroded our resident’s trust in the council and its administration”

0.2% of what, exactly

East Suffolk Council takes the smallest share of your council tax bill of any of the four bodies on it. Its General Fund Budget and Council Tax Report 2026-27, approved by Full Council on 25 February, sets out the 2026/27 Band D bill like this.

Who Band D 2026/27
Suffolk County Council £1,731.69
Police and Crime Commissioner for Suffolk £304.47
East Suffolk Council £197.82
Town and parish councils (average) £100.82
Total £2,334.80

That £100.82 is the district average for town and parish councils. In Woodbridge the town council precept is higher, at £186.54, which takes the town’s own Band D bill to £2,420.52.

East Suffolk’s own charge is 8.5% of the district-average bill. A rebate of 0.2% of £197.82 is 39.6p. The same report projects the East Suffolk share rising to £203.67 in 2027-28, the year the motion is aimed at, where 0.2% comes to 40.7p.

The figures at the district level work the same way. Figure 13 of that report puts the council’s total council tax income at £19.105m in 2026/27, rising to a projected £19.920m in 2027/28. A rebate of 0.2% of the 2027/28 figure is about £39,800.

The council has already committed four times that to putting it right

The council’s own Better Recycling page lists what it has spent on recovering the service, and the numbers are larger than the rebate being asked for:

  • £62,400 for a four-month contract with a waste operations specialist, appointed after discussions with the Association for Public Service Excellence
  • £102,000 for additional customer service staff for a four-month period, to handle calls and emails

That is £164,400, described as one-off costs funded from the Waste and Recycling Strategy reserve. It is roughly four times what the motion would return to taxpayers.

Bar chart comparing the £39,800 a 0.2% council tax rebate would return to East Suffolk taxpayers with the £164,400 the council has already committed to recovering the Better Recycling service, made up of £62,400 for a waste operations specialist and £102,000 for extra customer service staff. Per Band D household the rebate is about 40p a year out of a total 2026/27 bill of £2,334.80.
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The same page notes that the council is paid by government for the material it collects and recycles, worth an anticipated £2.6m in 2026/27.

What the council has already said happened

The council did not wait for this motion to apologise. At Full Council on 22 July, the minutes record the Leader, Councillor Caroline Topping, offering “her personal apology to those residents who had been affected”, saying it was “not good enough” and that as Leader she took responsibility. Councillor Sally Noble, the cabinet member for the environment and the councillor for Wickham Market, also apologised and said she would not pass the buck.

Councillor Paul Ashton, the deputy leader, gave the fullest account in those minutes. He said a contract notice had been issued to East Suffolk Services Ltd, the council’s own company that runs the collections, to formalise a joint improvement plan already under way. A waste operations troubleshooter with 20 years’ experience had been contracted for four months from the beginning of August.

On the causes, he listed teething issues with the new vehicles, inconsistent operational performance, driver recruitment and retention problems especially in the south of the district, a spike in staff sickness, route adherence and congestion at the tipping station. He noted that the launch coincided with the two hottest June days ever recorded.

He also gave the performance figures for the day before that meeting: wheelie bin collections 99% complete, garden waste 88% and food waste 90%. There were 302 outstanding requests for new bins at that point, against about 60 requests coming in a day and 100 bins going out a day. The council’s app had passed 53,000 downloads, which he said let the council message about a third of households by collection round. Recycling rates, he said, had improved by 10 percentage points.

The council’s public statement of 29 July added mechanical and hydraulic adjustments to the new food waste vehicles to the list of causes, and set out the “rhythm” the contractor was working to: an attempt to make sure no household misses a food waste collection two weeks running.

Four more bin questions on Wednesday’s agenda

The rebate motion is not the only bin item. The published agenda also carries a question from a Lowestoft-area resident, who says recycling has been “chaotic and unreliable” and asks what advice the council has for people whose bins are full before collection day. Four councillors have tabled questions of their own:

  • Councillor Colin Hedgley (Carlford and Fynn Valley) on older residents who need disposable medical supplies and were left with overflowing bins, asking the cabinet member to apologise to them
  • Councillor Mark Jepson (Eastern Felixstowe) on the cabinet member’s leadership, noting that an improvement plan was not introduced until the first week of July
  • Councillor James Mallinder (Deben) on what extra capacity is planned for the Christmas period, and how it will be communicated
  • Councillor Paul Ashdown (Lothingland) on whether the new green-lidded and brown-lidded bins are robust enough for severe weather

Three of the councillors raising Better Recycling on Wednesday, plus the cabinet member answering, represent wards within a few miles of Woodbridge.

Will it pass

Nobody should assume it will. A separate report on Wednesday’s agenda, on political balance, gives the council’s make-up as it has stood since 23 February 2026: 16 Green, 15 Conservative, 11 Labour, 9 Liberal Democrat, 2 independents aligned to the Green, Liberal Democrat and Independent group, and 2 independents in no group. That is 55 seats with no vacancies.

The two groups behind the motion hold 26 of those 55 seats. The groups that make up the administration hold 27. Two independents sit outside both. Motions can also be amended on the night, and the agenda as published carries no amendment.

The meeting is being broadcast on the council’s YouTube channel.

What it means for you

  • If you are still waiting for a green-lidded paper and card bin, or a food waste container or caddy, report it by 30 September. The council says that from 1 October it will handle all bin requests under its normal system rather than the Better Recycling process.
  • If your bin was missed and your neighbours’ bins were collected, report it. If the whole street was missed, the council says it already knows, and asks you to leave the bin out.
  • If a food caddy is not emptied, the council’s advice is to bring it in, store it with your other bins, and put it out again on your next scheduled day. Extra food waste can go in the general waste bin.
  • Requests for replacement black and blue lidded bins are being worked through over six to eight weeks from 14 September, the council says, after those were pushed behind the new bin rollout.
  • Collection days for your address are in the council’s bin date finder and its app. Our Woodbridge bin collection days page sets out how the three-weekly cycle works locally.
  • The East Suffolk share is only part of what you pay. Our Woodbridge council tax bands page shows the full bill by band.

Sources

The per-household and district totals in this article are our own arithmetic from the council’s published Band D charges and council tax income figures, and the inputs are shown above so you can check them.