In May 2022, Leeds City Council officially opened its operational base, Newmarket House, to house management and front-line waste services. At the same time, the council took the opportunity to improve the efficiency and accountability of its operations. The council’s waste and recycling fleet comprises 80 refuse collection vehicles ranging in size from 12 tonnes to 32 tonnes.
Matthew Birkett, service manager at Leeds City Council: “We already had a legacy CCTV recording system installed onto waste vehicles, but the retrieval of footage either took too long or we’d discover too late that a camera was faulty and hadn’t captured the necessary footage.
“We make about 500,000 collections each week, if there is a complaint or issue from a member of the public, or a crew member, we must deal with it immediately. It can’t take weeks or months to resolve.”
Birkett explained: “The Fleetclear RXLite camera system provides a HD 360° view around the vehicle so whatever the issue we can see exactly what happened and take necessary action. The image quality is good and with the Fleetclear Connect software we can protect our vehicles and drivers’ in real-time.”
The Fleetclear Connect software platform encompasses a range of aspects of vehicle and driver safety, operational efficiency, and compliance. It is suitable for all vehicle types and combines vehicle hardware and safety technology with tachograph information, GPS tracking, telematics including fuel & carbon analysis, driver behaviour, and compliance monitoring.
Birkett added: “Fleetclear Connect is a fantastic system. We have an online dashboard, where we can easily view and extract the information we need. For example, because the footage is geo-locatable, we can identify any vehicles that have passed through a certain area and view all sets of coverage from each vehicle. We can identify who was there and what happened in seconds.”
The new system means that the council can use the footage as evidence to mitigate false insurance claims or take action in improving behaviour or safety practices.
Stephen Perrin, sales manager (North & Scotland) at Fleetclear: “Leeds City Council has pulled out all the stops to further improve its waste and recycling service provision and the vehicles that perform collections are an important part of these operations. Our camera systems are robust and reliable, built for harsh environments, and with our software platform the council can now track its entire fleet in real time as well as quickly retrieve specific footage from any vehicle.”