Coventry City Council has conceded that asking residents to wait as long as three months for a new bin is unacceptable, after a councillor demanded to know why delivery times were so slow.
The admission came from Cabinet member for city services Patricia Hetherton, who was responding to questions from councillor Barbara Mosterman about the length of time it takes the authority to replace damaged, broken or missing bins.
Hetherton stressed that three months represents the outer limit of the waiting time, rather than what most households should expect. “In most cases, waste bins are delivered sooner,” she said.
She explained that the extended window is built in to cover busier periods, stock shortages, delays from suppliers, and the logistics of scheduling drop-offs across the city. “However, this timeframe allows for periods of increased demand, stock availability issues, supplier lead-in times, and the scheduling of deliveries across the city,” Hetherton said, adding that the council keeps a close eye on how deliveries are performing and tries to get bins out to residents “as quickly as practicably possible.”
Despite that assurance, Hetherton was candid about the shortcomings of the current system. “But yes, we sometimes tell people it’s going to be about three months. That’s not good enough. We know that,” she said.
She also pointed out that Coventry is among a small number of councils that do not charge residents for bin replacements. “There’s only a few councils that don’t charge for replacing bins and we are one of them,” she said.
Mosterman pressed the council on when it would introduce a system capable of tracking how long deliveries actually take, and what it could tell residents in the meantime, arguing that a more precise timeframe ought to be given. Hetherton acknowledged that the average delivery time is not currently recorded, but said the council is looking at new systems that could improve how such information is logged, monitored and reported in future.
The scale of demand is significant. Council figures show that between June 2025 and May 2026, it dealt with almost 11,000 requests from residents across the city to replace bins that were damaged, broken or missing. Of those, more than 4,700 involved green bins, just over 4,300 concerned blue bins, and the remaining 1,800 or so related to brown bins.
The revelations come as the council continues to face criticism over a separate issue: its rollout of a new food waste collection service, which remains months behind the government’s original deadline of 31 March.
