Fresh criticism of Swindon's bin collections by one of the town's MPs has been dismissed by the borough councillor in charge.

Sir Robert Buckland told the Adver last week he believed that the the issues faced by residents since the new rules were implemented in November boiled down to the fact that the Labour-run council hadn’t assigned a specific senior officer to oversee and take responsibility of the project.

The Conservative South Swindon MP explained that he had also personally experienced missed bins and delays as the council carried out the biggest changes to bin collections in the town in 15 years.

Sir Robert said: “We have had issues, we have had missed collections, we have had delays, and I’ll be honest with you, in all the years of being MP I’ve never experienced this degree of disruption.

“There wasn’t a single specific senior officer at SBC who is managing this project and that is puzzling you know, you would have thought that there would be one person whose mind is chiefly focused on this transition, it was coming in at a difficult time of year.”

But councillor Chris Watts, Swindon Borough Council’s cabinet member for the environment and transport, countered: “I would suggest that Mr Buckland is getting confused and might have benefited from a conversation with me to ascertain the facts. He has my number and knows he can call me any time.

“Trying to point to the logistics delivery stage as the source of the problems is disingenuous. As someone from a project planning background, I see no compelling evidence that a suitably applied critical path analysis, peer review or cohesive planning framework was introduced in the 2022 project planning stage.

"This is why I have called for an independent review, not as a witch-hunt exercise, but to ensure that future projects do not disappear down the same rabbit holes.”

Cllr Watts placed blame on the project management of the previous Conservative council - unseated in May last year - and that there had not been enough project managers assigned during 2022.

He claims this affected the number of wagons and routes used and the back-office support.

He then pointed toward the work that the current council are doing to resolve the issues he says are down to the Tories in the first place.

Cllr Watts says those improvements include additional recycling wagons, redesigning the waste and recycling depot as well as restarting the project planning of the back-office system.

Leader of the Swindon Conservative group Gary Sumner rejected those claims.

He said: "The rollout of the service was supposed to have a specific project manager. In the end I believe the project was shared among officers – which isn’t enough of a focus on a complex rollout.

"Cllr Watts has had since May, with specific oversight of the project and I’ve seen no concerns raised prior to the implementation. If he had a grasp of the service area and the potential issues he could have delayed the rollout.

"The waste team deserve our full support and it should be stressed that the time to implement was critical and had been planned for October.

"As a former cabinet member and deputy leader I am aware that Cllr Watts would have had oversight of the project and not operational control which sits with officers under the corporate director and chief executive.

"When areas under my control had issues, I owned them politically and apologised. I didn’t seek to blame others and I’m not really sure how long this can be credible when Labour is approaching a year in control of the council and services provided."