Councillors vote at 6pm tonight on £2.5m to design a new Weston recycling centre and depot, part of a £56m scheme. The current depot lease ends July 2028.
Update, 19 September 2026: the vote passed. North Somerset Council confirmed the next morning that it had “approved proposals to develop a new waste depot and household waste recycling centre” (North Somerset Council, 9 September 2026). The rest of this article is as published before the meeting.
North Somerset councillors vote tonight on spending £2.5m to design a new household waste recycling centre and waste depot for Weston-super-Mare. The full scheme behind that vote is costed at £56m.
The meeting starts at 6pm in the New Council Chamber at the Town Hall, and the report is item 8 on the agenda. (Council reports pack, 8 September 2026)
Tonight’s decision is not a decision to build anything. It buys the design work, the planning application and the permitting, so that a real price can be put in front of councillors later. The report is explicit that approval “is not a commitment to deliver or fund the proposed Waste Depot capital scheme”.
The deadline behind it
The reason this is moving now sits in the report’s corporate implications section, and it is a date.
North Somerset Environment Company, the council-owned company that collects the district’s waste, has no security of tenure at its current depot beyond 28 July 2028. A new depot cannot be built by then.
The council’s own words on what happens next: waste services “would need to be delivered via a contingency arrangement which would cost significantly more than the current service”. During that period the council also says it will not be able to maximise what it earns from selling recyclable material.
The existing recycling centre is described as no longer fit for medium and long term service, with limits on layout, condition and safety, and on capacity to handle future growth. The current depot is forecast to be full by 2037.
What the £2.5m pays for
| Activity | Cost |
|---|---|
| Contractor pre-construction service agreement | £1.409m |
| Employer’s agent, including clerk of works | £500,000 |
| Council officer costs | £220,000 |
| Other, including planning | £368,000 |
| Framework fee (0.25%) | £4,000 |
| Total | £2.5m |
The components add to £2.501m and are rounded in the report to £2.5m. The money would be added to the council’s existing capital programme, funded from non-earmarked capital, which could include capital receipts, reserves, or section 106 and community infrastructure levy contributions.
What the £56m covers
The £56m is an indicative total, not a figure being approved tonight. It assumes the scheme is delivered in 2029, and it includes a contingency of up to 25 per cent, which the report ties partly to ground conditions on the Avoncrest part of the site.
| Component | 2026 prices | 2029 prices |
|---|---|---|
| Waste transfer station | £26.284m | £29.353m |
| Transport and operations hub | £15.028m | £16.783m |
| Household waste recycling centre | £8.340m | £9.313m |
| Other, including fees and project management | £460,000 | £551,000 |
| Total | £50.111m | £56.000m |
The recycling centre most residents would actually use is the smallest of the three items. The £5.889m difference between the two columns is construction cost inflation over three years.
Stage two, the construction contract, would be up to £53.5m and needs a separate vote. The report says funding would likely come from a mix of savings inside the waste service, income from selling recyclables, the extended producer responsibility waste grant, and borrowing, and that it must be weighed against everything else in the council’s February 2027 financial reporting round.
Where it would go
The preference is to consolidate the depot and the recycling centre together on land at Aisecome Way and Avoncrest, a closed landfill site.
Putting the two on one site is meant to cut costs and deal with health and safety problems on the existing site. The report also says the current leased depot cannot take the charging infrastructure needed to electrify the bin lorry fleet, and that new fire prevention rules would be costly and impractical there.
The Avoncrest landfill is separately being studied for ground-mounted solar, and the report notes an anaerobic digestion plant already operating next door.
The alternatives, and why they were dropped
The report sets out seven options. Six were rejected:
- Do nothing. Keep the existing depot with enough spending to fix immediate health and safety problems. Leaves the tenure risk untouched.
- Refurbish and extend the existing depot. Cheaper up front, but the tenure risk remains, along with site constraints and no long-term capacity.
- Lease or buy an existing facility. Site assessment work found no suitable site offering secure tenure.
- Share a depot with another authority. Travel time would hit service performance and push costs up.
- Delay while more work is done. Rejected on construction cost inflation and the tenure clock.
- Build the depot but leave the recycling centre out. Doing them separately would cost more and waste the Aisecome Way site.
What it means for you
- Nothing changes at the tip this week. Tonight’s vote funds design work. The existing recycling centre carries on as it is.
- The bill is not settled. If the full scheme goes ahead, the £53.5m construction stage would compete with everything else in the council’s capital and revenue budgets from February 2027 onwards.
- A contingency period is now likely. Even on the council’s own timetable, the depot will not be ready when the current tenure ends in July 2028, and the report says the stopgap will cost more.
- A planning application is coming. The design contractor’s job includes preparing and submitting it, so there will be a public consultation on the Aisecome Way and Avoncrest site. Applications are searchable through our North Somerset planning news page.
- Check your own collections separately. Bin days are unaffected by this decision: see North Somerset bin collection days.
How to follow it
The meeting is being streamed on the council’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/live/ZYHRxIJU4m0.
The deadline to register to speak passed at noon yesterday. Petitions can still be handed in by councillors up to noon today.
The report is presented by Councillor Steve Bridger, cabinet member for digital, AI and service transformation, and Councillor Annemieke Waite, cabinet member for planning and environment. It is recorded as not being a key decision, because it is a decision for full council rather than an executive one.
Ward councillors Annabelle Chard and Ciaran Cronnelly have been briefed on the project, along with Councillor Michael Solomon as chair of the committee covering assets, transport and the environment.
The council’s duty to run these services is statutory. Section 45 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 requires it to collect household waste, and section 51(1)(b) requires it to provide places where residents can deposit it.
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