Trouble at the tip
A half-arsed stand-off between central government and local councils is making it harder for people to do the right thing. Westminster should be worried.
Do check out this week’s Abundance Agenda podcast, with special guest Andrew Hunter Murray from Page 94 - The Private Eye podcast. It’s an incredibly fun episode touching on second homes, HS2, and some of the well-intended standards that are holding up new homes.
My partner is a recycler, from a family of recyclers. When I say ‘recyclers’ I don’t mean ‘people who recycle’; but people for whom recycling is a way of life comparable with, say, joining the army or becoming a missionary. Owners of kitchens lousy with bins, to whom a scrap of material in the wrong place causes physical pain. But it wasn’t a ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ this year, because I made a terrible mistake that would have far-reaching consequences for our quality of life.
Like many bad things, it started when I checked the council website. For several years - ever since we moved into this house - we had been putting glass in the recycling bin. This was normal for every place either of us had ever lived. Indeed, Google’s AI assistant will confidently (and American…ly) inform you that in our village, “kerbside glass collection is part of the regular refuse collection schedule. Glass bottles and jars are collected fortnightly, on the same day as your general refuse.”
In hindsight, this should have been the first clue. It turned out that we were supposed to take our glass to the glass bank all along, and had spent literally years waging accidental warfare on the bin men1, people, and environment of Bedfordshire.
The mistake I made was telling my partner all this, instead of just lying about it so we could continue to chuck glass in the recycling bin like middle-class gangsters. A few days later, once she’d calmed down enough to speak, she made it abundantly clear that we were going to follow the ‘new’ rule, and so I resigned myself to carting glass bottles and jars to the local tip every other week. This was already bad, but it was about to get even more annoying.
Central Bedfordshire Council are in a financial struggle. They’re struggling because they are a ‘council’, a sort of government blame distribution sink that is forced to fund unlimited amounts of social care while having its income strictly regulated by Westminster. That means all the services residents expect to receive for their money - boring stuff like libraries, green spaces, roads, transport - are being incrementally gutted, year after year. The tip is no exception. In fact it is quite literally - I’m so sorry - the tip of the iceberg.
How do you make a tip worse? Well you can start by reducing the staff so it’s not open for as long, and you can get more militant about which residents are allowed to go there, because Christ forbid some Hertfordshire deviant should rock up with a boot full of cardboard and expect to sensibly dispose of it in an environmentally friendly manner. Or, you could get really creative like our council and deploy an online booking system designed to demoralise and crush your spirit before you even leave the house.
Visiting a tip is a serious business and it requires a serious booking system to match. To even access it in the first place I had to create a dedicated user account, and then solemnly declare to uphold the values and principles of the household waste and recycling site. At which point I was confronted with this:
Page two of eleven. Page two of eleven.
A mere five pages in, after handing over your personal information, describing your car and giving a brief summary of your career objectives, you get to select your time slot, presented in handy 20 minute increments in this migraine-inducing wall of Bedfordshire purple:
This could be a problem since I don’t know exactly when I’ll get to the tip on any given day. Luckily it doesn’t matter because nobody at the tip actually cared when I turned up in the wrong slot, driving a completely different car to the one I’d accidentally put on the form. As long as I’d performed the theatre and could show them an email confirmation for… something, I was allowed in.
Now obviously this is all very ‘first world problems’ and nobody actually died, but let’s step back and consider: this isn’t something I’m doing for fun, it’s something the government desperately wants me to do in order to combat climate change and achieve its Net Zero targets. It’s good for the planet. It’s something we should be encouraging people to do.
And yet, like so many other parts of the public sector, the council have adopted the Bernard Black theory of customer service: trying to use a public facility is treated like a hostile act, viewed with intense scrutiny and suspicion. Are you really ill? Do you have to get a new driving license? Couldn’t you just bury your wine bottles in the garden? The overwhelming message is: “What are you doing here? Why have you come? Why are you so annoying? Why won’t you just **** off?”
The best solution would be kerbside glass collection - expanding bin collections to accept glass - and this is where things get absolutely maddening. It turns out that Central Bedfordshire Council looked into this in 2018, and thought it was definitely something they should do, but decided to hold off on the idea:
“We want to provide glass collection, but the government has recently announced a new national deposit return scheme) for drink containers (plastic, glass and cans). That might reduce the frequency of glass collection or eliminate the need for it altogether.”
You might be wondering what happened to that scheme: a child of the short-lived May government it was supposed to launch in 2023 but was delayed until 2024. Then it was delayed again until 2025. Then it was delayed again until late 2027 when it will absolutely definitely happen… but glass is now excluded because apparently it was too complicated to deal with.
Faced with these delays and uncertainties, the council wisely decided to go ahead with kerbside collection anyway… but then didn’t. They cut it before it could start due to the aforementioned financial black hole, with the latest budget:
“Delaying the implementation of kerbside glass collection until 2026/27, saving £1m of cost in 2025/26. The Government may provide funding to councils that are not already providing this, so it is more prudent to wait.”
That decision is at odds - by exactly one day - with the Government’s Simpler Recycling policy, which states that: “by 31 March 2026, local authorities will be required to collect the core recyclable waste streams from all households in England.” CBC’s approach seems to be that if they hold out for as long as possible, maybe some pot of money will appear to ease the transition; and conversely that if they were to start glass collection now they would put that future hypothetical funding at risk.
Needless to say, this is a completely dysfunctional way of delivering government, like watching an estranged couple passing messages via fridge notes.
The key word here is ownership, as in ‘lack of’. I’ve written several posts now, covering playgrounds, car parks and now glass recycling, and a common theme is that while everyone agrees that these things are terribly important, nobody will actually take responsibility for them, and so the public are left with a dismal experience as a result. People often blame funding for the decline of public services, and of course budgetary constraints don’t help, but this cultural refusal to own anything unless legally compelled to, coupled with a chronic lack of trust between tiers of government that verges on open hostility, is perhaps an even bigger part of the problem.
And that has much larger consequences. The Guardian reported from Thurrock this week, where residents feel ‘betrayed’ over Brexit. “We’ve never really seen the investment we were promised,” said one interviewee, while his partner was bewildered that despite all the money she believed had been saved by leaving the EU, public services hadn’t improved. I know a lot of Remainers will sneer at this - what did they expect? And yes, sure.
But I think this illustrates a critical disconnect between a political milieu that increasingly fixates on abstract meta-issues like Brexit, immigration numbers, poll leads, or whether GDP went up or down by 0.2%; and a public that experiences Britain through waiting times, traffic jams, potholes and services that get more difficult to use every year for no obvious reason - topics that ‘Big Politics’ seems to struggle to engage with in any meaningful way or even take seriously.
It’s easier to have big philosophical debates about Brexit or immigration than to accept that the reason most people are unhappy is because they’re waking up each morning to a public realm that seems shittier and more annoying to deal with than it was yesterday, even as they’re paying more for its upkeep. Until a party steps forward with a genuine plan to change this, people aren’t going to get any happier, whatever happens to immigration numbers, or whatever deal we strike (or don’t strike) with the EU.
Do you want a Reform government? Because that’s how you get a Reform government.
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Another reminder to check out this week’s Abundance Agenda podcast, with special guest Andrew Hunter Murray from Page 94 - The Private Eye podcast. It’s an incredibly fun episode touching on second homes, HS2, and some of the well-intended standards that are holding up new homes.
Although I’m not sure the bin men care, given they spent three years chucking clear transparent bags pull of glass into their lorries.
I remember the glass thing from when I lived in Bedfordshire - thankfully I lived next door to a big Morrisons with recycling bins (this was also handy when I broke my toilet, but that's another story).
Where we now are in Enfield, the council's website has a handy "Here's how to recycle!" function, with info on what/when/how to recycle, how to order new blue bags, etc. Except it can't find our flat in the postcode lookup* and has no information whatsoever for people (like us) living in flats with big communal bins, so we just stick it in a blue bag, chuck it in the big bin, and hope for the best.
*I know, free the PAF, but it's a 20-year old flat and a local council that presumably needs quite accurate records of residences in the area, how are they cocking this up so badly?
Don’t mention the actual rate of successful recycling….. with quite a fair bit (about 40%) not recyclable due to contamination etc…. But this is about the unholy combination of lack of funding and the need to act within legal duty…. Not just what they have to provide but also not to overspend on their set budget…. These pressures don’t fix the natural tendency of all organisations to be incoherent, wasteful and inefficient - it just makes the examples of all such nonsense so much clearer when they are operating within such artificially constrained parameters.