Residents in Coventry waiting three months for new bins as council admits ‘not good enough’
The problem has been raised with the city council
People in Coventry are facing lengthy waits of up to three months for a replacement bin.
The problem has been raised with the city council, which says the lengthy waiting time is “not good enough”. It says it now plans to upgrade the system to prevent these delays.
News of the changes came after Cllr Barbara Mosterman (Cons, Cheylesmore) submitted a written question to the authority asking why the standard delivery time for a new bin was so long.
In a written reply, Cabinet member for City Services Cllr Patricia Hetherton (Lab, Radford) said: “The three-month period represents a maximum timeframe for delivery rather than the standard or expected delivery time.
“In most cases, waste bins are delivered sooner; however, this timeframe allows for periods of increased demand, stock availability issues, supplier lead-in times, and the scheduling of deliveries across the city. The council continues to monitor delivery performance and works to ensure bins are provided to residents as quickly as practicably possible.”
The response added that the average delivery time was not recorded on council systems but that “options are being explored for a new system that would improve how this information is recorded, monitored and reported in the future and improve efficiency and delivery times for residents.”
Cllr Mosterman pressed for more details when she raised the issue again at a meeting of the full council, where she asked “when a system to track bin delivery times would be implemented and what assurance can be given to residents in the meantime that delays are being actively monitored and reduced.”
She also argued that telling residents to expect a wait of up to three months would “risk normalising delays and setting unnecessarily low expectations.” A more accurate expected timeframe should be provided instead, she said.
Cllr Hetherton responded by saying: “There’s only a few councils that don’t charge for replacing bins and we are one of them. But yes, we sometimes tell people it’s going to be about three months. That’s not good enough. We know that.”
She says the existing replacement procedure logged requests by each zone of the city but the council is looking at upgrading to a digital system instead.
“As soon as we get that off the ground, we won’t have this situation again,” she said. “There is no way that we want this. But we do need to take our time and analyse, because we are data-led and we’ll make sure that we can actually improve on this. Nobody wants to wait three months for a replacement, we know that.”
In the year from June 2025 to May 2026, the authority handled almost 11,000 requests from Coventry residents to replace bins that were damaged, broken or missing. More than 4,700 of the requests related to green bins, just over 4,300 to blue bins, and the other 1,800 to brown bins.