Central government and local government lock horns over bin collection

Chris lancashire

Local Government - yet another unreformed public sector which has had money showered on it by Labour. Unfortunately most of it went on layers of useless management whilst the hourly-paid workers were left to their own devices.

Wastrel

The solution is for Big Society to heap the resultant mess on the heads of those responsible by despositing the rubbish in the car parking spaces at the town hall reserved for so called "senior executives". It would soon be cleared, whatever the weather.

Verity

Where I live, we get rubbish collection six days a week. Dependable, efficient and friendly. One day off for Christmas. One day off for New Year. Otherwise, every day but Sunday. Also, no bag fascism. You can use any sort of bag you have handy.

Verity

PS Eric Pickles is the most admirable person in the Government. I'd like to see him PM and John Redwood at the Home Office.

Whoaaaahh!

Dave-Fylde

In the Fylde, my nearest household waste disposal centre is being closed down. If the bin men don't pick up my rubbish, I have a 12 mile round trip to get rid of it.

I know some councils sort all the rubbish for you (lucky Londoners!) The green bins here are for grass cuttings and garden stuff, not cardboard, which strikes me as strange as we produce vastly more cardboard to recycle than grass.

I wonder if these other councils could have suggested putting rat attracting waste in both bins around the christmas period to protect against split bags?

Liberty

Suffolk CC has become a virtual council, providing no services but buying in services from private providers. Essex CC has signed IBM to rationalise and automate all its services. In both cases they expect to make savings of between 30% and 60%. I prefer Suffolk's strategy because the council will have only costs it seeks to reduce and no vested interests or empire building tendencies. Private firms can find ways of reducing costs as long as the councils simply buy projects or time limited renewable contracts and not fall into the traps of PPP. Perhaps the coalition could force all councils to do one or the other or a bit of both?

eyesee

Government and not just local, needs to cut back on what they do. The reason front line activities are always the first to be hit is twofold; 1) you notice it and 2) it continues to hide all the things councils do with our money that they have never been asked to and, frankly we would rather they didn't. You will not get a satisfactory purpose out of your council until those running it come to realise they are there to organise things for us, with our money. That humility will bring great benefits, but pork may become airborne first. Our politicians need to relearn a traditional skill too; politics. This will remind them they have a job to do and maybe start doing it. We could debate the EU for instance. (Wouldn't that be funny. Defence,'I have here a chocolate teapot which you will all agree has great utility'). It was a lack of leadership that got us a coalition, but for goodness sake someone get a grip. We don't need 20% VAT 'tough but necessary', we need a plan to reinvigorate industry, particularly manufacturing. We need to stop taxing ourselves out of existence and reinstall honesty and integrity (the opposite of New Labour). It is easy really, but it takes guts and guts and sinecure are not frequent bedfellows.

David M

Is it wrong that it annoys me every week when I have to sort out my rubbish into four different receptacles, whilst having to pay Chiltern district council vast amounts in council tax? If they want to hump my wallet they should at least have the good grace to sort out my rubbish.

2trueblue

This is just another symptom of what is wrong with politics, whether local or national, these people have no idea why they are there.... to serve us.

Ed P

Please do not dump your uncollected rubbish on the council offices doorstep. But if you do, make sure it cannot be traced back to you.

TrevorsDen

We can rest assured that local authorities will self-servingly cut the easiest most most publicly damaging services and blame the govt rather than taking the trickier harder to work out measures to do the same if not more with less.

We have weekly collections but of different types.
Week 1 recyclable stuff plus kitchen caddy.
Week 2 none recyclable stuff plus kitchen caddy.

Works well. But non recyclable stuff has not been collected since before the snow fell.

Robert Eve

Spot on Verity - Pickles & Redwood.

Plus Carswell & Hannan.

TomTom

What happened to the Writ of Mandamus ? Surely there is a legal obligation to collect refuse ?

If not there should be legislation to permit householders to withhold Council Tax or pay into the County Court pending judicial review

Verity

OK, Robert Eve. Hannan can be in the FO and see to it that all lefty, trendy rubbish that's posted on the websites of our embassies and high commissions all over the world is junked. He can also put some trade sanctions on Pakistan, Somalia and other rubbish countries that owe their allegiance to an unpleasant diety who was promoted by a desert-dwelling epileptic (before we had medication for this condition) until they repatriate all their citizens from Britain.

Carswell can develop the programme for binning our membership of the fascist EUSSR within six months. Or at least delivering a referendum.

The person in charge of prisons can negotiate deals with Viet Nam and Thailand for our prison service to be outsourced to them.

I don't see any women I want to promote.

libertarian

Well I hope you will all be voting for Independent Councillors on May 11th Its the only way to restore resident centred services

( Yes I am standing)

Occasional Ostrich

@Verity

So . . . you're not that struck on David Davis?

Colin

You know what, coffee housers? Stop whingeing and get organised.

Most of these useless, power crazed local council tw*ts are elected by very few people and majorities are often wafer thin; in the case of my london borough council, many wards were won by majorities of less than 30.

So, if you don't like what they're doing to you, get organised and target the tw*ts for political extinction, ward by ward...

Baron

Verity @ 4.22 Robert Eve @ 6.46:

so, darlings, how do you propose the Pickles & Co are to get in, ha? It’s just a titillating whinge, a useless masturbation of your spleen to say what you’ve said. In the current tripartite party system there ain’t any chance of installing these guys into power.

what’s needed anyway is not a politician, but a statesman, a thinker, who can reverse the curse of welfarism, convince the unwashed that welfare ain’t the solution to our predicament, but the problem itself. The notion that throwing money at every societal boil and wart can eliminate or at least ease the limitations of the human condition is what’s killing us.

it seems that not even the near financial meltdown has done the trick to bring sanity back. Is it a destiny or what that nothing but a total implosion of the current system of tax and spend will do it?

Cllr Steve Tierney

There's a lot of councillor-bashing in this comment thread. A lot of "these people don't know why they are there" and "they waste our money."

Surely you must realise that there are many Conservative councillors who care very much about saving money, doing things well but at reasonable cost and serving the public.

Please don't tar all councillors with the same brush. Many of us are just like the commenters here - concerned about the same things, in the job for public service and just trying to do the best we can in the dismal Labour-created environment.

Baron

Cllr Steve Tierney, sir, would you care to speculate why in Prague and other Czech cities and towns where local taxes wouldn’t pay even for the salaries of many of our Councils Chiefs, the binmen are cruising 10 hours each day, collecting rubbish as they find it?

shall I give you a hint? The money councils raise there is spent mostly on services that benefit everyone, not just a selected bunch of the perceived ‘needy’ that happens to be in vogue, often for electoral reasons. Have you ever broken down the cash you dispense into just two parts: expenditure on all burghers, expenditure on the few? The ratio here will be the reverse of it there, I reckon, even though the country there’s poorer.

two long-time favorites of mine from ‘caring’ Britain: a payment of £50,000 to a lesbian group to learn knitting based on patterns of some obscure Indian tribe; the hire of a PR agency to explain a reduction in library services even though the Council has 13 press officers on its staff. Hard to beat both, I reckon.

AndyinBrum

In Brum the weather was a factor, but to blame the council is wrong, the bin men are striking & working to rule, because they are losing bonuses implemented by the Unions and previous administrations, mainly labour, to ensure men earned more than women.

The unions are now the ones castigating the council for not paying women the same as men. Says it all really, but to blame the council for none collection is wrong, blame the pathetic binmen and unions

Ken Bishop

Methinks most of the ranters are missing the piont. Many councils now collect fortnightly. Miss one collection (owing to bad weather, a flu epidemic among dustmen, or whatever) and you're a week without collections. Duh.

Geoffrey Dron

There is difficulty in accessing the Localism Bill article. I reported this in December.

Cllr Steve Tierney

>>Cllr Steve Tierney, sir, would you care to speculate why in Prague and other Czech cities and towns where local taxes wouldn’t pay even for the salaries of many of our Councils Chiefs, the binmen are cruising 10 hours each day, collecting rubbish as they find it? <<

Well - I'm not really bothered what they do in Prague. That's their business. But I absolutely agree with you that the levels of public sector pay, particularly in the higher staff at councils, is out of control. And don't think that many councillors aren't making *exactly* these observations in committees and group meetings and elsewhere.

But it was councillors who were being bashed - and councillors are not the same as council officers. I earn less than minimum wage as a councillor - something which is possible because its an "allowance" and not a wage. Don't get me wrong - I'm not looking for a payrise. I have never done this for the money. I'm just pointing out that your criticism of high pay is mistargetted if you include "all councillors" in your attacks.

Remember - the inflation of the public sector - which very much includes all those bloated quangos - happened primarily under Labour. It will take time - and care, if we want to avoid choosing the wrong targets - to reverse all this damage.

But Conservatives are working at fixing the economy at every level. Its challenging, unpleasant and thankless work. As you can see by the easy targets we make for blog comments.

Flame away! : )