Binmen pulled from routes to take children to school amid bus driver shortage
22 August 2022, 08:26 | Updated: 22 August 2022, 08:30
Binmen are being redeployed to take pupils to school after a shortage of bus drivers left more than 1,000 children without transport in Scotland.
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North Lanarkshire Council has pulled bin lorry drivers from routes to help transport children to school, after students in Scotland returned to education last week.
Blue bin collections in the county will be suspended for three weeks as a result, with residents urged to dispose of paper and card in their general waste bin, or take it to a recycling centre.
In a statement, North Lanarkshire Council said transport issues were down to Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) being unable to "engage bus drivers".
"Residents may be aware that Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) failed to put in place a number of school bus contracts in time for the start of term," a spokesman said.
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“While work has been carried out to reduce the number of school bus routes affected, many remain unserviced. The council has a legal duty to transport children who are eligible to school.
"To assist SPT, who have sourced some additional buses but have been unable to engage drivers, some of our appropriately trained and qualified drivers will be required to drive buses for school transport.
“While we will seek to engage replacement drivers as quickly as possible, this means that we have taken the difficult decision to suspend collection of blue paper and card bins for the next three weeks, until Monday September 12."
It comes after North Lanarkshire Council said SPT was “unable to organise transport on a range of routes for the start of the new session”.
Lynsey, whose son could be affected by the driver shortage, told LBC the situation "should never have been able to happen in the first place".
"The kids are off school for almost seven weeks and why at the eleventh hour there wasn't enough drivers last week when the kids returned is the big issue," she said.
She said they are "clutching at straws" with the temporary solution of redeploying bin lorry drivers.
"The problem with the temporary solution is this is now affecting people in the community who don't have children that use school transport, and now their bins aren't going to be emptied for a few weeks, and understandably they're not happy."
Lynsey said she only learnt that school bus drivers were going to be replaced temporarily with bin lorry drivers through Facebook, and said she "couldn't believe" what she was reading.
"This is laughable," she told LBC.
"I'm bemused and bewildered by the whole situation."
SPT blamed the issue on “an unprecedented volume of renewals” for mainstream school transport contracts and apologised to parents.
It assured families that it was “continuing to work to resolve this situation as a matter of urgency”.
