Household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) in Wiltshire are to close for two days a week starting in June, Wiltshire Council has confirmed.

From 8 June 2015, all of the 11 centres in the county will be closed for two days a week on rotation, with one in each area (north, south, east and west) remaining open seven days a week. As such, the openings hours for all HWRCs in the county will be reduced from 9am to 4pm in the winter and 9am to 5pm in the summer, to 10am to 4pm all year round.

However, every HWRC, operated by Hills Waste Solutions, will be open on ‘high usage days’: Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

The move is expected to save £300,000 of the £30 million savings that the council needs to make over the next few years, due to budget cuts.

There are no plans to close any centres permanently.

Hills Waste Solutions is now consulting with the 31 employees who could be affected by the change.

Mike Webster, Group Director at Hills Waste Solutions, said: “Where possible, affected HWRC employees will be offered additional work within the company to minimise the impact the changes may have on them and recruitment for HWRC vacancies will be suspended to allow for the redeployment of existing HWRC employees.

“We will continue to deliver the same high quality service at the HWRCs as we have done in the past and these proposed changes will not compromise our standards of operation.”

County councils struggling to balance budgets

County councils across the UK are increasingly looking at partially closing HWRCs in order to save money.

In October last year, East Sussex County Council limited three centres to Friday to Saturday openings in a move predicted to ‘achieve financial savings’ of around £250,000 per year.

Earlier in 2014, local authority (LA) cost-cutting saw Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council close all four of its HWRCs for one day a week, Aylesbury Vale District Council remove more than 80 council-run recycling banks and Dorset Waste Partnership remove around 100 recycling bring banks.

Other local authorities, such as those in the Dorset Waste Partnership, have also looked at introducing entry charges to HWRCs to save money, however, earlier this month the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) pushed ahead with legislation banning the practice.

It said that residents ‘deserve a comprehensive waste and recycling service’ in return for their council tax and that councils charging residents were ‘attempting to impose a “backdoor” charge, circumventing the will of Parliament and the government’.

This announcement came despite half of the respondents to a preliminary discussion paper on the legislation voicing opposition to the new proposal. The Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC) expressed ‘extreme disappointment’ with the decision, sating that the legislation would mean that LAs will have ‘greater restrictions on how they balance budgets with a greater possibility of services being cut’.

Find out more about the HWRCs in Wiltshire or the new ban on HWRC charges.