The tipping hall that takes Northampton's household rubbish has a failing floor. Cabinet backed a £1.2m repair; the temporary props cost £10,000 a week.

The building every Northampton bin lorry tips into is being held up by props, and they are costing the council £10,000 a week.

West Northamptonshire Council’s Cabinet agreed on Tuesday 15 September to ask Full Council for £1m of extra capital funding to repair the first-floor tipping hall at Brackmills Waste Transfer Station. The full repair is quoted at £1.2m. The council already holds £200,000 in an approved waste infrastructure capital project, so £1m is the gap. (Cabinet decisions, 15 September 2026)

What Brackmills does

The station was built in 1983 and is owned by the council, operated under a 15-year contract by Thalia. It is where waste is “bulked”, tipped out of collection vehicles and loaded into HGVs for the longer run to a treatment plant, because bin lorries are slow and thirsty over distance.

It handles:

  • about 66,500 tonnes of residual household waste a year
  • all the residual waste Veolia collects in the Northampton area
  • some household waste from the Daventry and South Northamptonshire areas
  • waste from all six of the council’s household waste recycling centres

Its environmental permit is unusually wide, allowing clinical waste that other transfer stations nearby will not take. It runs seven days a week.

The floor gave way

The council’s report says the structure “has suffered significant failure in recent months”, in the first-floor tipping hall, which has “significantly restricted” what the site can do. Three areas of the tipping hall floor need strengthening. The work would be phased so the station stays open throughout.

One detail sits awkwardly in the report. Four engineers’ reports were carried out on the building in the past two years, and until recently none identified structural issues; the condition was recorded as consistent with the operation of a waste transfer station.

Temporary props are in place now to keep the site working while repairs are arranged. Leaving them there is the “do nothing” option, and the report prices it at £10,000 a week, calling it “not considered to be a financially sustainable solution”. Annualised the way the report annualises its other options, that is about £520,000 a year.

Bar chart comparing the annual cost of three options for Brackmills waste transfer station: the proposed £1.2m repair at about £240,000 a year over five years, leaving the temporary props in place at about £520,000 a year, and using a commercial waste transfer station at about £1.5m a year
The repair is the cheapest of the three options the report set out, and the only one that leaves the council owning the asset.
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The alternative was £30,000 a week

Because the council, not Thalia, is contractually responsible for structural problems, the council would also have to pay for a stand-in site if Brackmills went out of use. The report priced that at at least £30,000 a week, roughly £1.5m a year, at a commercial transfer station, partly because bulky and upholstered waste is shredded at Brackmills and would not be at a contingency site.

Set against that, the repair works out at about £240,000 a year over the five extra years of life it is expected to buy.

A stand-in is not simple either. It would have to sit close to central Northampton to avoid lengthening collection rounds, hold planning permission and an Environment Agency permit, keep waste under cover and be large enough for safe HGV movements. The council’s own Westbridge depot is the obvious long-term site for a replacement station, but most of it is leased to Veolia and Northampton Partnership Homes, and it has no suitable building.

What it means for you

Your collections are not changing. The stated purpose of the repair is to keep household waste moving out of Northampton “without re-routing or disruption to residents’ waste services”. Bin days are unaffected. Ours are listed on the Northampton bin collection days page.

This is a five-year patch, not a fix. The report is explicit that a long-term waste transfer solution for West Northamptonshire is needed, and that this work buys the time to develop one. That is a decision, and a cost, still to come.

The money is not approved yet. Cabinet resolved to recommend the £1m to Full Council, which has to approve it. The council’s next Full Council meeting is on Thursday 24 September; its agenda had not been published when this was written.

It should earn something back. Once the hall is repaired, the contractor can accept commercial waste at the site, and the council takes a percentage of that income. The report also says the restored capacity is needed to support the planned change to waste services in 2028.

It lands in a difficult year. The council is forecasting a £13.1m overspend on its revenue budget. This is capital rather than revenue spending, so it is a separate pot, but it is another £1m call on a stretched balance sheet.

Sources