Another week, another assault on family budgets, with price increases across what are, for many people in Ireland, essential services.
Private health insurer VHI delivered its now customary bad news in January – a further increase in premium prices from March. The increase will, on average, be 3 per cent but those on some plans could find themselves paying significantly more.
VHI upped prices by an average of 10.5 per cent last year and, looking at the wider market, the Health Insurance Authority said the cost of health insurance policies in Ireland increased by 11 per cent on average in the first three-quarters of last year.
We’ll come back to health premiums at a later date. For this week, we focus on the more mundane but still significant cost of having your household waste collected. It, too, was in the headlines after Panda – the biggest waste collection operator in Dublin – announced increases to its services from this weekend. That followed a similar move by Greyhound, the second largest player in the city, a couple of months ago.
In a world where people like me exhort householders to constantly compare prices in the market and switch providers for better deals, getting a fix on the most competitive rates for bin collection can be a real headache.
None of the companies make it easy and almost all of them appear to charge different rates depending on where you live in the State, sometimes even where in a city.
Panda
Take Panda. If you live in north Dublin, as of now, the company offers four options – three monthly plans and a “pay by lift” option.
Sign up today and, given the price hikes announced earlier in the week, you can expect to pay €22.50 a month for its Essential Plan, €26.50 for its Standard plan and €30.50 for its Plus plan aimed at larger families.
Each offers unlimited fortnightly collection of green (recycling) and brown (compost) waste. On black bins (general waste), you are permitted 42kg, 65kg and 85kg of waste a month under the respective plans. Go over those limits and you will pay 28 cent for every kilo.
Under its “pay by lift” option, you face a half-yearly service charge of €70 on top of which you will pay €13.50 every time they lift your black bin, €3.80 per brown bin lift and €1.25 for the green bin. You also pay 7.5 cent per kilo for any recyclable (green bin) waste.
That green bin lift charge is up from €1 just last week and the black bin lift charge has jumped by €1.75 (almost 15 per cent). The service fee increase is a more modest €2.50, or 3.7 per cent.
But the charging structure for Panda customers in south Dublin is, in parts, entirely different and, so far, they have not been alerted to any price increases this year – though I expect they are coming. Quite why the company does this piecemeal is baffling and must be remarkably inefficient for them – inefficiency for which we no doubt pay.
Panda offers the same Essential, Standard and Plus plans where I live in south Dublin, with the same structure – unlimited green and brown bin collections and a weight allowance for general waste. There the similarity ends.
Charges – at €20.50, €23.50 and €27.50 respectively a month – might sound cheaper but for some reason I certainly cannot fathom, the weight limits on the plans are different. The 42kg limit on the Standard plan is lower than the 65kg available on the same (but higher-priced) plan in north Dublin.
In fact, it matches the weight limit on Panda’s budget Essential plan north of the Liffey – with the costs working out as €22.50 for Essential in north Dublin versus €23.50 for Standard in the south of the county.
So Panda is offering plans with the same names but entirely different features (and prices) across the State.
For reference the weight limits in the south of the county are 32kg (Essential), 42kg (Standard) and 65kg (Plus).
The differences don’t end there. Under Pay by Lift, consumers in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown paid a quarterly charge of €25 – generally taken once a year. That’s well shy of the €140 our north Dublin cousins would pay over the same period.
Lift charges are also dramatically lower at €4.80 (black), €1.50 (green) and €3.08 (brown) under the plan, but down south we also pay additionally per kilo of waste collected – 35 cent per kg for general waste, 7.5c/kg for green waste and 20c/kg for compostable waste.
Greyhound
But what about other providers? Greyhound is the second largest operator in the Dublin market. It also offers an even greater range of plans – monthly charge, pay by weight or pay by lift.
Its Pay by Lift offering carries a €79.95 service charge per annum – though it is currently offering €20 off that for new sign-ups.
Thereafter, you’ll pay €4.50 every time your general waste bin is collected plus 25 cent per kilo of waste in that bin. The per lift charge is the same for the recycling bin but the per kilo cost falls to 2 cent. On the compost bin, you will pay €4 per lift and 10 cent per kilo of waste.
If you prefer to go for its Pay by Weight offering, you will pay a weekly charge of €3.75 (which comes to a hefty €195 a year) after which you will be charged 46 cent per every kilo of general waste collected, 34 cent a kilo for compost bin waste and 21 cent for each kilo of recycling waste.
Its monthly plans are priced suspiciously close to those of Panda, at €20 for its light waste Standard plan allowing you 32kg of general waste a month, with a steeper-than-average 30 cent a kilo excess for anything above that.
The Family plan, offering a 42kg monthly limit and the same excess charge, costs €23.95, while its Family Plus plan allows you 65kg of general waste a month for €29.
You can also avail of a blue glass bin at an additional cost of €5.99 a month, though it is not available everywhere and is collected only seven times a year.
Thorntons
Thorntons are the other Big Kahuna in Dublin, having recently swallowed up rival City Bin. It makes a big play on its website of the fact that, unlike its rivals, it does not charge a service fee. Its offering is also more streamlined.
It offers just three monthly plans – EcoBand Lite, EcoBand, and, borrowing perhaps from Apple’s iPhone branding, EcoBand Pro.
The budget Lite option offers a modest 25kg of general waste collection a month for €18.99. That rises to 40kg for €22.99 a month under EcoBand and 65kg at a monthly price of €26.99 under the Pro option.
In each case any waste over the respective limits is charged at 28 cent a kilo.
Dublin users fare better than the company’s customers in Kildare, Meath and Wicklow, where the same plans with the same weight limits and excess charges cost €22.99, €27.99 and €31.99 respectively.
Of course, the options open to you depend on where you are. Not all of the above operators serve all areas of the city. Shopping around is very much limited to which companies serve your area.
And I am very conscious that, for the most part, we are just looking at Dublin. Down the country, there are fewer options and, generally as far as I can see, higher costs.
Advanced Waste
Some of City Bin’s loyal customers were forced out following the merger with Thorntons under instruction from the competition regulator as part of the price for greenlighting that deal. Many of those are now with Advanced Waste, which offers a fortnightly service.
It appears to offer four monthly plans called Monthly, Light, Standard and Family Plus at €24, €22, €25 and €28 respectively. Monthly and Standard both allow 45kg of general waste a month, a figure that falls to 30kg under the Light plan and rises to 60kg under Family Plus.
Excess weight is charged at 27 cent a kilo.
As with its rivals, you also have access to recycling and compost bins under those monthly plans.
The annual plan costs €65, which sounds like a bargain compared with its monthly offerings but you do also pay lift charges – €11.25 per lift for general waste, €2.20 for a recycling bin and €6.50 for compost.
A 45kg limit per lift is built into those prices, with any excess again charged at 27 cent a kilo.
KeyGreen
Among the smaller operators, KeyGreen has a presence in Dublin 4 and Dublin 6 postcodes.
Its KeyLite monthly plan charges what appears to be a very competitive €17 for 40kg of general waste. The company’s KeyStandard plan offers 50kg of waste for €22 and the KeyPlus plan will charge €27 a month for up to 70kg of general waste. The excess charge is again 27 cent a kilogram.
As with many of the operators the cost of the green and brown bins is subsumed in those figures with the service offered free.
Oxigen
I couldn’t get figures for Oxigen in Dublin. Like many of its peers, you have to guess where it operates before it will tell you what it will charge and I ran out of time and patience.
In Kildare, you can go the Pay by Lift route for an annual service charge of €72 on top of lift charges of €11 for up to 45kg of general waste, €8 for 45kg of compost waste and €4 for up to 20kg of green waste.
Go over those limits and you’ll pay excess charges that vary from 23c/kg for general waste, 18c/kg for brown waste and 15c/kg for green waste.
It also appears to offer an annual plan at €360 giving you 72kg of waste (presumably across all three bins) per month and carrying an excess charge of 23 cent a kilo above that.
Confused? I thought so. But if you think having a chat with the companies will help, I wouldn’t bet on it. Customer service, for so many companies in the Irish utilities sector – and others, like airlines – exists in no more than name.
Trying to contact Panda, for instance, is an exercise in frustration and you can expect to take almost a full hour of your day and the phone charge that goes with it before you can get through to a real person.
And if you think they deserve brownie points for the option that allows you to hit a certain key, promising to “hold your place in the queue and call you back” in the next 30 minutes, they don’t. I’m still awaiting a call back from calls made just after Christmas.
It wasn’t always thus, but perhaps new owners Macquarie saw paring back such offerings as one way to get some payback on their reported €1 billion acquisition of the business from founder Eamon Waters and private equity group Blackstone.
Still, comparing costs across the sector has not been a total waste of time. A quick glance at my own bill over the past year shows I have been paying far more than I should be. One more thing for the “to do” list.
You can contact us at OnTheMoney@irishtimes.com with personal finance questions you would like to see us address. If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can read it here.
