Readers may raise an eyebrow at the figures of missed bin collections, which show that even at its worst Brighton and Hove City Council seemingly only receives an average of 30 calls a day from the public.

“This can’t be true,” they might say. “No one in my road has had their rubbish collected for four weeks,” they may add.

The council, by its own admission, has been unable to keep an accurate record of missed collections until recently.

There was a point where its call centre stopped counting altogether to focus instead on picking up the slack.

It’s difficult to know whether more people reporting their rubbish or recycling going uncollected would have made much difference.

What is important is working out how we got to this point.

Council officials have been quick in the past to tell The Argus that this is not a political issue and is operational.

But politics at a local level is inextricably linked with operation.

Politics dictates a council’s budget and how it raises it, and how it negotiates.

Every political judgement will have an operational knock-on effect.

A council’s politics, ultimately, affect all of us.