To hire a Skip or not to hire a Skip

To hire a Skip or not to hire a Skip

March 10, 2014

Obtainable from the local Council for a weekly-renewable fee, this permit is intended to ensure the public’s safety. The permit holder has a responsibility to minimize hazards, obstructions and dangers that might affect pedestrians, residents and drivers as a result of the presence of the skip and its contents.

You’re restricted from placing a skip on a pavement because this obstructs pedestrians’ walkway and poses a health and safety risk to them. If a skip is staying overnight on a public road, you have to obey further rules in order to avoid having to pay a penalty of up to £1000. You’ll need to contact your local council and/or skip hire company to find out which rules you will need to follow. These concern things such as the use of traffic cones; reflective markings, and night safety lights, as well as the skip needing to display the name and address of the skip hire company.

All of this can pose problems for property owners who want to hire a skip – perhaps because they’re carrying out renovation work to their property – but who have no driveway or front garden in which to put one.

Hopefully, the road outside their property will be spacious enough for a skip to be sited there. Of course, you’ll need to check, with the skip hire company you use, that they have an appropriate skip permit, allowing them to place the skip – or, perhaps, skip bag – on the road outside your property.

The skip hire company can usually obtain this permit online, either by downloading an application for a skip permit or directly applying for one. It will need to provide details of the address adjacent to where the skip will be placed, along with the date on which the skip will first be placed in the road.

It can take up to a week for a skip permit application to be approved or rejected. Obviously, if the application is rejected – perhaps because the road is narrow, in constant use and/or contains vehicles parked on both sides of the road – you not only will be unable to have a skip but your skip hire company will have incurred costs on your behalf and will want to recover those from you.

Waiting a week to find out if you can hire a skip can adversely affect the schedule of the work that’s generating the waste intended to go in the skip. The cost of the weekly permit may not be to your taste either.

Talking to Waste King may help.

Not only – given appropriate notice – might Waste King be able to arrange a skip permit that would fit in with your work’s schedule but it could circumvent the need for skip altogether by arranging for its trained operatives to collect waste as and when required.

This not only does away with the cost of skip permit; sorting out such things as traffic cones, night lights and so on, and worrying about other road users’ health and safety but it has other advantages. For one thing, Waste King’s operatives will load their vehicle with your waste. If you hire a skip, you have to load it yourself.

There is quite a long list of things you can’t – legally – put into a skip. That doesn’t apply toa Waste King vehicle. Waste King can dispose, legally, of hazardous materials as well as waste electrical products – none of which can legally be put into a skip.

Waste King operatives can clear waste from anywhere on your property, so there are no restrictions to access – unlike the case with a skip. In addition, they turn up when you want them to turn up – so your rubbish goes as soon as you say so. Yet, if you had a skip, the rubbish could remain on or close to your site for at least a week.

Moreover, there’s never any risk of your neighbours fly tipping in your (now non-existent) skip – and Waste King charges you on the basis of the volume of waste it collects. This is a more accurate measure of the cost of waste disposal, rather than you having to guess how big a skip (or how many skips) you will need before the waste is generated.

In addition, Waste King operatives segregate and separate all the waste materials they collect – so that Waste King is able to recycle at least 95 per cent of all the waste materials it collects. Compared with having to take materials in a skip to a landfill site, this is a much more environmentally friendly approach – as well as possible being a cheaper alternative.

To find out exactly how we can help you, contact us