Self-Promoting Cllr Whitehead Sidelines Albon & Stands On Refuse Workers' Necks

Thanet District Council's deputy leader, Cllr Helen Whitehead, has pushed her way into the social media row over the district's waste collection crisis, inviting any resident with a bin problem to contact her directly.

Whitehead knows the protocol perfectly well. The Cabinet portfolio holder — in this case Cllr Steve Albon — speaks for their own service, and colleagues stay off their patch.

So jumping into the rubbish row and offering to sort out residents' collections can only be read as an aggressive political act, and many will take it as a vote of no confidence in the besieged and conspicuously silent Albon.

Perhaps her audacious move is because Albon is about to be sacked from Cabinet. Perhaps, as I suggested in my earlier article, he is preparing to resign. Either way, few residents would mourn the departure of one of Thanet's least effective councillors.

What is clear is that sharp-elbowed Whitehead intends to prosper from Albon's difficulties. Maybe she wants his job. Or maybe she is building a platform from which to challenge council leader Rick Everitt for the top political post at TDC. Whatever her motivation might be , its clear that the bin crisis has opened serious ructions inside TDC's Labour group, and Whitehead is working the disarray to her own advantage.

A shake-up at TDC is badly needed. But it should not come at the expense of the council's workforce, and least of all the frontline crews trying, against the odds, to empty our bins.

Yet in her posts, Whitehead points the finger at “seven drivers off over the last week, which is why recycling is waiting longer for collection”. Not one word about how senior management planned the switch to Simpler Recycling, which I set out in my previous article on this service delivery disaster.

On the evidence so far, this mess was made by the mishandling of that transition — not by seven absent drivers.

And if seven absences really can bring a whole service down, the questions answer themselves. Why had the council not recruited and trained enough drivers to absorb a handful of absences? After two months of sweltering heat, what was done to improve working conditions? And what of the stress on crews pushed to hit impossible targets while the service collapsed around them? Sickness on that scale does not come out of nowhere.

It is always easier for a politician climbing the greasy pole to sidestep the inconvenient explanation and blame people who cannot answer back. Is it any wonder that when Labour politicians, such as Whitehead, hang out to dry hard grafting people, such as TDC refuse collectors, for failures not of their making, the working class loses any confidence or respect they might have had for the Party.