It had taken my first four months at Inverness to win the respect and confidence of the workforce and let them see I’d fight their corner when necessary. The two Shop Stewards came in one Friday afternoon with the General Foreman to ask ‘for a word’. They were very concerned about a country road (by Errogie) that they felt was unsafe for our RCVs. They’d raised it with my predecessor who wasn’t interested as ‘some of the people up there know Councillors.’ That I held an HGV Licence gave them the impetus to speak to me about it. I said I’d have a look on Monday with Graham, the General Foreman. As we left the Depot Graham (who would never address me by my Christian name until I’d left the Council) said ‘this is a bad one Boss’.
It didn’t take long to see the problem and I decided to get a Report to Committee recommending we no longer use this road and the collection points for the residents’ wheeled bins be redesignated as per the 1990 Act. I underestimated the problems that would emerge.
I’d come from Renfrew and Hamilton District Councils where both had one political party (Labour) in power. As a Chief Officer, any Report on a contentious issue was submitted to the Labour Group who after some debate would either tell me to forget it or to bring it to Committee for approval. But Inverness District Council had no such majority, comprising Councillors from the Conservative, Labour, SNP and LibDem parties as well as a few ‘Independents’. The LibDems were a nightmare as they’d never give you any idea how they were going to vote, always ‘we’ll listen to the debate and then make our minds up’. It wasn’t uncommon for half the LibDems to vote for a new proposal and the others against it. To complicate matters, one Councillor was also the Deputy Editor of the ‘Inverness Courier’ and another was the Sports Reporter for the ‘Press & Journal.’
When my Report came to Committee, it was met with significant opposition: ‘these people are paying Council Tax and are entitled to get their rubbish collected from their house’; ‘the snowplough goes round this road in the winter’; and ‘the coal lorry can get round this road, so why can’t our binmotors’ etc. I was tempted to suggest they hand their rubbish to the coalman but didn’t. Sensing that if it went to a vote my proposal would be scuppered, Councillor Cattell our Convener, (a retired Farmer that I’d briefed beforehand) halted the debate by saying ‘I think we should have a site visit to see for ourselves what the problem is’.
So on a sunny autumn morning a luxury coach left the Town House and headed for Errogie. As we left the main road, I could hear the stage whispers: ‘there’s nothing wrong with this road. I spoke to some of the locals at church last Sunday and they’re very angry that somebody from the lowlands is trying to stop a service they’ve had for decades’; and ‘we never had these problems when Mr Fraser was the Director’ etc.
Then the bus abruptly stopped. Cllr Cattell asked the driver why? After a short discussion he told the Committee ‘the driver is refusing to drive the bus round the next hairpin bend as he says it’s far too narrow and there’s a 200 ft drop into a ravine. We’ll have to get off’.
Although the driver had engaged the parking brake, the bus had started to inch forward over the gravel surface. As we helped the Councillors disembark I was asked, ‘why can’t we just reverse back and turn around?’ I said ‘there aren’t any places where we can turn: we’re now committed to this road. That’s the reason why I don’t want our trucks on it.’
We’d now made things safer for the Committee but that didn’t solve the problem, given the bus driver’s stance, so Graham volunteered to drive it round the bend. I said I’d sit beside him but he replied ’if it goes over the edge, what’s the point of both of us being killed?’
So he gingerly inched the bus safely round the bend with the Committee walking behind in total silence.
When we returned to the main road, Cllr Cattell told the bus driver to pull into a layby and announced ‘I’m now Convening an Emergency Meeting of the Committee and propose that from today, The Director of Cleansing alone has the final say on which roads our trucks travel. Is there anybody here who is otherwise minded? No, so that’s it settled.’
– Written by John Crawford, CIWM Life Member