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The leader of Caerphilly County Borough Council has apologised for disruption to bin collections over Christmas and vowed “matters are in hand to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.

Councillor Sean Morgan accepted collections over the festive period “fell short of the usual reliable service” and said the “below-standard” performance had been acknowledged.

Collections were “fully up to date” until Christmas Eve, but then fell victim to several issues, resulting in a “significant impact” on rounds, Cllr Morgan told councillors at a meeting on Tuesday January 14.

“These factors included shortcomings in the management of staff, issues with the coordination of leave rotas, and resource pressures caused by sickness absence,” he explained. “We do collect approximately 40,000 collections every day, or ten million collections a year, which normally happen seamlessly, but this Christmas period lessons have been learned.

“We are urgently revising arrangements to ensure that this was a one-off, which will not be repeated.”

Cllr Lindsay Whittle, who leads the council’s Plaid Cymru group, said it was “good of the leader to apologise”.

“I think members of the public will appreciate that,” he told the meeting, adding that he expected most councillors would agree that waste collections are “a service that you hardly ever get a complaint about”.

Cllr Whittle accepted residents “all have more rubbish, more recycling, more cardboard boxes” over Christmas, but said it was a “shame that some people had to wait four or five weeks for their bins to be collected”.

“I’m glad that we’ve had lessons learned,” he said, adding he had heard reports “of some people shouting at” collection crews.

“These people are not there to be shouted at,” he said. “These people do a good service in the early hours and in all weather conditions.”

Councillors from the Labour, Plaid and independent groups added their own compliments to the council’s waste staff for their work to catch up on missed rounds.

Cllr Morgan told colleagues collections are now up to date across the county borough, and said food waste had “generally” been collected quickly over Christmas – but that meant other waste types were pushed further down the pecking order.

He also commended staff for “going over and above during the last two weeks to catch up on the missed collections”.

“Some of these frontline operatives have had very little break over the Christmas period, while the majority of us were actually enjoying the festivities,” he added.