SWANSEA: 560 missed bin collections a week, and the council says the rate is ‘very good’

Swansea Council’s bin crews missed 29,103 collections last year, nearly 560 every week, the council has told councillors.

That is down from 34,402 the year before, a drop of about 15%, and the council sets it against more than 12 million collections a year. Counted that way, the miss rate fell from 0.28% to 0.24%.

Cllr Cyril Anderson, the cabinet member for community services, gave the figures in a written answer to five councillors, Lyndon Jones, Will Thomas, Hannah Williams, Angela O’Connor and Mark Tribe, ahead of Thursday’s full council meeting.

On the percentages, he said, “it is recognised that the performance is very good”. He added that he fully appreciated the actual number appears high to the public, and that “clearly there is still room for improvement”.

Broken down, the 2025/26 figure “still means nearly 560 missed collections reported” a week, he said.

The first six months of this year are “still being cleansed”, according to the answer, but the early indication is that performance is “stable”. Councillors will get the half-year figures once the data is tidied up.

What 0.24% looks like on your street

The 12 million figure counts every bag, box and caddy picked up from the city’s homes. With a weekly food waste collection, fortnightly black bags and the recycling in between, a single household clocks up more than 100 collections a year.

The count is of misses reported to the council, so a bin left behind and never reported does not appear in it.

The summer the crews went missing

The improvement follows a bad run. In June 2025 Cllr Anderson apologised “to everybody who has been affected by missed waste collections” after a wave of complaints, and said the council was recruiting “significant numbers” of new staff and bringing in agency cover.

The 2025/26 figures are the first full year since that apology. The 34,402 misses they are compared against were racked up in the year that ended two months before it.

Missed bags land on top of rules that are already among the tightest in Wales: three black bags a fortnight, a limit in place since 2014, with exemptions for large families, houses in multiple occupation and homes with nappies or pet waste.

Crews have also been given more to do at the kerb. From this autumn they are checking black bags for food and recycling under the “clink or stink” campaign, with warnings first and fixed penalties for households that keep ignoring them.

The council has the results to point to. Swansea’s households recycled 72% of their waste in 2024/25, third of the 22 Welsh councils, which the council says makes it the best-performing city in Wales.

When it apologised last year, the council’s advice for a missed collection was to leave the bags on the kerb and crews would return the next working day or as soon as possible after.

The question was answered in writing, so it was not debated on Thursday. The five councillors asked for a two-year comparison and got one; the half-year numbers that would show whether the “stable” claim holds are still to come.