City of York Council is bolstering all its front line teams together so that it can continue providing essential services across the city, including collecting your household waste (black bins), recycling boxes, cleaning York’s streets and collecting litter bins, carrying out pothole repairs and maintaining public toilets.

Unfortunately, we have experienced a reduction in our frontline workforce and this is having an impact on some services, including recycling collections. The council is doing everything it can to ensure collections continue and is working weekends to collect missed recycling where possible.

To make sure services can keep running we need to recruit more drivers and loaders in our waste services team so we have enough people ready and able to do the job.

We’re working with Work With York to recruit drivers and loaders now. Find out more by calling 01904 554234 or visiting www.workwithyork.co.uk/jobs/

Cllr Paula Widdowson, Executive Member Climate Change, said: “It’s really important that we keep essential services running across the city such as household waste collections. We’re doing our best and have tried and tested measures in place, such as we did during Storm Dennis. But the reality is that these services like many others will face significant challenges. So we’re calling out for anyone who is physically fit, available and wants a temporary job. We want to help you so please contact Work With York and we’ll get you on our books and into our team as soon as possible.”

These are unprecedented times and this will mean some non-essential services will need to be temporarily suspended so that we can redeploy all our staff into keeping essential services running.

During Storm Dennis and Storm Ciara front line teams were redeployed into different services so that they could focus on protecting the city. This meant they had to ‘down tools’ temporarily on other work, and the same thing will happen again here.

As works are almost complete on the repaving scheme for Stonegate and the roadworks on Monkbar, we are aiming to complete these as planned. Other non-essential roadworks schemes will be temporarily suspended.

Check when your bins will next be collected, get the latest service updates and order a new bin – all online! www.york.gov.uk/waste