Asked, at the last Council meeting, to apologise to those residents whose bins were not emptied on time, Cllr Levene refused to do so.

Instead he claimed that only 0.12% of collections had been missed.

He conveniently forgot that 90% of residents did not have changes to their collection days.

Last Christmas some bins weren’t emptied for nearly 3 weeks and, although there have been fewer missed collections this week, the holiday season could being more problems.

Green waste collection stops at the end of the month.

The Council has incurred additional overtime expenditure on Saturdays “catching up” with missed deliveries.

Cllr Levene protestations were undermined by a fellow Cabinet member who, in response to a separate question about delays in answering at the Councils call centre, said,

“the significant increase in calls week beginning 9th September were due in the main to the waste collection changes affecting a large proportion of residents in York.

Clearly original estimates of resources needed to meet demand had to be re-evaluated once the real impacts were known, and then adjusted”.

The Cabinet member went on to say that

“We aim to answer 80% of our calls within 20 seconds with 95% of calls being answered”.

This compared to the actual performance, in early September, when average waiting times were 2.5 minutes with 40% of calls being abandoned.