Storm in a food caddy - row breaks out over food waste tender
Deputies have been warned to stop trying to interfere in the appointment of a contractor to deal with the island’s food waste.
In the States yesterday, Deputy John Dyke accused the States Trading Supervisory Board of blocking an unnamed company which claims it could deal with food waste at no cost to the States.
Outside the meeting, Deputy Carl Meerveld alleged that procurement processes were excluding the local company from competing in the collection of food waste. He said he and several other deputies were preparing a requete to force the issue to a debate in the Assembly.
But STSB president Peter Roffey dismissed the claims as ‘scurrilous’ and said the deputies complaining were acting unprofessionally.
‘This nonsense really has to stop,’ said Deputy Roffey.
‘There were quite a number of companies which put in for this [tender] process. Are we going to have a situation where only those with deputy champions will be able to cut through the process and actually win?
Listen to a round-up of yesterday's debate on our 'Shorthand States' podcast with Simon De La Rue and Matt Fallaize
‘This is not professional. This is not the way we should go about things.’
The current contract for food waste runs out at the end of the year. STSB is hoping to cut costs by about £500,000 a year in the next contract. Following the tender process it wants to issue the contract to a different company to the one promoted by Deputies Dyke and Meerveld.
Deputy Roffey revealed in the States that Deputy Meerveld had sent an email predicting that the STSB president would back down over the tender row.
‘I had an email a few weeks ago from a member of this House in charge of standards with a bit on the end, clearly not meant for my sight, that said “don’t worry, we’ll bring a requete on this, but we probably won’t have to bring a requete because Roffey won’t want to be seen as the villain – Roffey will back down”,’ he said.
‘Well, I tell you what, Roffey will not back down.
‘When I’ve been through an objective tendering exercise, overseen by central procurement, who by the way also dealt with multiple appeals against that process and found those appeals to have no validity, I’m going to do the right thing.’
