Cabinet decides on 1 September who empties Harborough's bins from April 2027. The five-year contract also covers street cleaning and grounds maintenance.

Harborough District Council’s Cabinet will award the contract that runs bin collections, street cleaning and grounds maintenance across the district at its meeting on Tuesday 1 September. The item is listed as “Environmental Services Award of Contract” on the council’s forward plan of key decisions, published on 21 August.

The council’s own market engagement notices put the job somewhere between £4.5 million and £5 million, so it clears the £50,000 threshold that makes a decision a key one many times over. It is not marked exempt, which means it should be taken in public.

The current contract expires on 31 March 2027. The new one starts the next day.

What the contract covers

The council’s own procurement notices set out the shape of it. The services being bought are recyclables and waste collections, street cleansing and grounds maintenance, “from April 2027 onwards”.

  • Contract start: 1 April 2027
  • Contract end: 31 March 2032, a five-year term
  • Value on the council’s November 2024 market engagement notice: £4.5 million
  • Value on a follow-up notice in January 2025: £5 million

Both of those figures come from soft market engagement notices, which are the council testing what suppliers can offer rather than the contract itself. The November 2024 notice says plainly that it “does not commit the Council to any future competition or award”. The actual awarded value will be in the Cabinet report.

Why 1 April 2027 keeps coming up

That date is already familiar to residents. It is the day weekly food waste collections finally begin, seven months after caddies started landing on doorsteps this August and September.

The council’s stated reason for the food waste delay is having “the correct vehicles and fully trained crews”. The contract timetable is the other half of the answer: 1 April 2027 is day one of the new environmental services contract, and the current one runs out the evening before.

We covered the caddy gap in full in Harborough food caddies arrive now, collections wait to 2027.

Who runs it now, and the paperwork nobody had done

The district’s bins have been collected under an agreement signed on 8 March 2010 with FCC Environment Services (UK) Limited. It was revised and restated on 9 August 2012, then amended by six deeds of variation and a signed correspondence, the most recent variation dated 28 March 2025.

In 2023, responsibility for actually delivering the service moved within the FCC group to FCC Recycling (UK) Limited. The contract was never formally transferred to match.

That was only discovered last year, while lawyers were drawing up the lease for a new fleet of waste vehicles the council bought in 2025 and leases to its contractor. The council’s own decision record puts it bluntly: “During the preparation of the lease documentation, the absence of a formal novation of the Existing Agreement was identified.”

A single deed was executed on 29 June 2026 to fix both at once. The council rejected re-procuring the services to solve it, on the grounds that it was already procuring the replacement contract anyway. Its record states there were no financial changes: “The contract value, payment terms, and commercial arrangements remain unchanged.”

So the company named on the contract that expires in March 2027 has only been the company on the contract since June this year, three years after it started doing the work.

What else Cabinet decides this autumn

The forward plan runs to next May. The dated items between now and Christmas:

Cabinet date Decision
1 September 2026 Environmental Services award of contract
24 September 2026 Land transfers to town and parish councils; £1 million community grant applications, year two; Welland Park project delivery update and additional capital funding; housing procurement and housing updates; a section 106 application at St Dionysius Church; business centre cafes
26 October 2026 Community Infrastructure Levy draft charging schedule, for consultation and submission to public examination; homelessness temporary accommodation procurement; keyholding and security contract (exempt)
30 November 2026 Lutterworth Country Park collapsed drain contract (exempt)

The Community Infrastructure Levy item in October is the one worth a diary note if you follow development in the district. A charging schedule sets what developers pay per square metre, and it goes out to consultation before it goes to examination.

What it means for you

Nothing changes on your bin day before 1 April 2027. Collections continue as they are until then.

What is being settled on 1 September is who does the job for the five years after that, and on what terms, including the food waste round that has not started yet and the fleet the council now owns rather than rents.

Cabinet meets at 5pm in the Council Chamber at the council offices in the Symington Building, Adam and Eve Street, Market Harborough. Cabinet meetings are open to the public, and the council publishes rules for public speaking at council meetings. Meetings are also recorded to the council’s YouTube channel.

One caveat on sourcing. We could not read the agenda papers for 1 September. The council’s committee system returns “A critical error has occurred” on the meeting page for that Cabinet, so the report itself was not available to us today. Everything above comes from the forward plan, the council’s published procurement notices and its own written records of decision. We will update this page when the report can be read.

Sources