Leeds is currently in the grip of strike action by refuse collectors; bin men in old money (Not for the 1st time either). I am not going to get into discussing the claims and counterclaims of the council and the unions, but what I have found is, for a council that does a fairly well developed internet offer, just how little they are leveraging it to keep customers informed.

Our bin has not been collected in nearly three weeks now, although we do now have the advantage of a skip in a front garden because of the kitchen renovations; an advantage I would not be surprised to see some of our neighbours take advantage of too.

When the collections missed for the second time, I thought I would go on the Leeds City Council (LCC) website and see what information they had to offer. What I was hoping for was some kind of information portal that would be aggregating all updates relating to the strike action. I went to the main LCC webpage, saw a news link about the strike affecting several waste storage sites (tips or dumps in old money) and at the bottom of that a link to a webpage specifically devoted to the strike action. “Excellent” thought I, “this will be what I was looking for”. Wrong!

First of all I could not get on the page because it kept throwing up errors until I temporarily disabled my firewall’s privacy settings. Not a good start, but then when I did get onto the page, all it had were some bland stock answers about the strike action. Yes, there a couple of lines on what to do if you don’t get a collection, which is basically, put you bin out on your next collection day (Duh!), but nothing more specific than that. What do customers want to know in such circumstances? When they are likely to be getting a collection in their area of course, but that page offered nothing to manage my expectations. We have had some people taking their rubbish to the waste storage sites themselves, but how are we expected to judge if that will be necessary without more specific information.

Twitter seems ideally suited for LCC to get out status updates on the strike, including when particular areas are going to get collections, and LCC does have a Twitter account. It seems though that this is only used to push out information rather than engaging with customers and answering queries. A shame considering elsewhere LCC are trying to make some services available via the web.

From Twitter I looked at the Posterous site set up by LCC to post updates specifically relating to the strike. Again a great idea, but what does it actually offer customers? What information is there on there? It seems to be more concerned about taking on union claims than with providing useful updates to citizens affected by the strike.

It does seem now that the council will be using a combination of private contractors and working council crews to start to clear the rubbish for the duration of the strike. The latest post on the Posterous page does finally give some useful advice, which has also been sent out via letter over the weekend to all households, but it still does feel that LCC could be using the web more to get their information out.

I would have liked to have seen some information on where they were getting crews working on particular days, but what about trying to make use of Leeds Twitter users as an information source of which areas are particularly bad? Use of the internet as an information source during such disputes is only going to grow, so bodies like local councils needs to be more on the ball about how they use these new technologies.