Happy New Year to Swindon Advertiser readers, and here’s to an excellent 2025 for Swindon.

I’m really keen that the Swindon Borough Council continues its improvement journey this year and demonstrates to residents a better and more responsive level of service.

I’m absolutely delighted that Councillor Chris Watts and the Council’s Waste & Recycling Team have started the year in exactly that fashion, delivering a much-improved Christmas service to residents without a repeat of the challenges that we faced last year.

Chris developed the idea of moving residents’ collection day to remove the immediate backlog of collections as soon as the crews enjoyed their well-deserved Christmas break.

This, combined with the additional vehicles deployed to collect the extra recycling we get at this time of year, has meant that we have been able to operate a normal service.

There have been some missed collections........

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