Senior figures at ailing waste management company May Gurney, which is soon to be absorbed into construction-and-services giant Kier Group, might not have time to enjoy any windfall payments from the merger deal – if how they ran the Bristol rubbish collection contract reaches the attention of the police.

It seems that soon after winning the seven-year ‘flagship’ contract in 2011, MG management realised that they couldn’t keep up with the pace of collecting rubbish and recycling throughout the whole of Bristol. So, instead of hiring more staff to spread the workload, the company’s bosses decided instead to MASSAGE THE FIGURES.

Whilst Bristol City Council set the time limits on how long ‘jobs’ should take on collection routes, it relied wholly on May Gurney to tell it whether everything that should be done had been done… Except MG routinely ‘closed’ active jobs, even if they had not actually been completed.

“Doing this saved MG hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines,” a well-placed source told The BRISTOLIAN, claiming also that “over 500 jobs” were dealt with in this way.

And the result? Rubbish piling up uncollected in hundreds of streets from Easton to Clifton and Filwood to Horfield.