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.
Quite simply Government (and by that I mean Westminster) isn't doing its job. Parliament should legislate for a standardise nationalised recycling scheme that everyone a abides by and understands. Recycling is one of umpteen issues where they're too politically cowardly to take action and own an issue. If they won't own an issue, local government certainly won't.
Here in Newark the district council collect the waste and the county council dispose (burn/recycle/bury) the waste.
One of the problems is that County signed a 26 year PFI contract in 2006 with almost no flexibility.
In the end the district are doing their own thing with glass collected once every 8 weeks curb side.
That said out tip is reasonably good, whilst you should pre register your vehicle, you don't need to book slots and unless you are on your third visit of the day no one is asking questions.
"Until a party steps forward with a genuine plan to change this, people aren’t going to get any happier..."
I mean, this is spot on, but when the answer to your question is "member of the electorate, you cannot expect a Continental level of public services, at American levels of taxation, so please choose one or the other" what is the likelihood we'll get a resolution any time soon?
Dan Niedle published data during last year's GE campaign highlighting that on average a UK taxpayer is willing to pay an additional £10 quid in tax to enhance the provision of public services. Generosity embodied.
Except there's 1000s of easy ways to make life better for the public (like, for instance, just allowing people to use the tip like they used to) which don't require increased taxation.
Unfortunately you're wrong. Respectfully. I was responsible for implementing this same system in a neighbouring local authority. The system saved £200k per year. Why? For various reasons: people not living in the area weren't able to use the facilities; commercial operators were prevented from using the facility; an electronic system meant the tip could operate with one less FTE delivering a saving. Etc etc.
I'd be eager to hear some of your other many 1000s of examples of easy, cost free, suggestions.
Saved for who though? The saving was made on the time spent by people having to book appointments beforehand. What about commercial operators fly-tipping, pushing the costs down the line (or merely asking their customers to do the tip run for them etc)?
Other suggestions to make life a bit easier? I used to be able to use my leisure centre. Now if I am member it is cheaper. How do I become a member? By applying for a card. Can I get the card at the centre? No...
What do you mean? The borough' taxpayers who pay for the operation of the tip through their council tax... That's who saves from the electronic system.
On fly tipping, you're excusing fly-by-night commercial operators who have such disdain for their locality that they're willing to dump rubbish on the side of the road. In any event, criminals will dump rubbish on the road side regardless of the options available to them. Whether there's a free service available. That's the nature of a criminal, they can't be bothered to play by the rules. Visit a facility, why bother, when their is a local roadside.
I can't comment on your obscure point about a membership card at your leisure centre. Needless to say, my point stands. If residents want to see tangible improvements, there are sacrifices to be made. Either way higher taxes, or identify which services are no longer valuable. Lots of services are elsewhere in the world chargeable unlike here. Single best example is social care and healthcare, both free in the UK.
I fear you missed my point. I don't deny that from the LA's perspective an electronic booking system is "better", but from a user perspective it is more hassle. As a user, it is not a tangible improvement to have to book an appointment, create an account etc. There are lots of little examples like this where a service was once X and is now Y, and X was "better" for the user (albeit with unseen costs).
My wider point is "If residents want to see tangible improvements, there are sacrifices to be made. " a) are there tangible improvements to me, b) why should I sacrifice?
Why should you sacrifice? Because you're an adult who understands that everything in life has a cost. Economis 101.. So you have to decide which you prefer: (a) higher taxes, which is unattractive to everybody or (b) less or worse public services. The other option, (c), is that UK Plc continues to borrow to meet the shortfall (deficit). Interest costs now run at £100billion per annum. Option (c) is short termist and unsustainable.
Returning to the narrow point of the tip, if residents want the convenience of a turn-up-at-anytime tip service, that's perfectly reasonable and understandable. But there's a cost to this, soooo...they need to choose. Do they want to pay an extra fifty pence on their council tax per year to pay for this enhanced service.
If you'll indulge me a second comment, my gut feel is that you have to go through all that palavar because they want to prevent commercial businesses using the tip for free. But given cut backs, councils have cut funding in enforcing the laws on disposing of commercial waste (hence why fly tipping seems to be getting worse as well). But ultimately that cost is still there, it is passed on to us through the painful and long process you describe. That results in people having to less of their working hours working and more on dealing with 'life admin'. See also having to wait an hour at the GP for a 5 minute appointment.
Yeah, my big frustration is now they have a guy at the tip they're paying to stand there and check people's phones, whereas before they had people there who could just stop a commercial vehicle on the way in, so it's not even clear that it's stopping anything, it's just sort of theatre.
In my neck of the woods (not far from you), we had to separately recycle 'white' paper from 'brown' paper. If you put an empty loo roll with a scrap of toilet paper on it, your recycling was "contaminated" and would not be collected. Instead you were to drive your recycling to the tip or just dump it in your waste bin. Somehow COVID-19 made it possible to recycle both 'white' and 'brown' paper together. Magic really.
Absolutely spot on about how the decline of the public realm and basic services is driver of distrust in all government and mainstream parties. Why trust politicians on the big issues when they can't do bins properly. Ex Council employee and I loved your description. I had to try to explain to people why services cut while taxes going up.
Great stuff. I was appalled, when moving to a house for the first time, rather than being in a flat, at how infrequent rubbish collections are - especially landfill, where they seem to give you am aggressively small bin and expect it to last two weeks. It’s surely, surely worse for carbon emissions for everyone to be separately carting their rubbish to the tip than to have a handful of trucks picking it up!
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.
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?
I mean, not to sound up myself but my partner has a PhD from Oxbridge and I'm also moderately clever and if we didn't spot this for literally years, what chance do most people have??
And to think I moaned to my local councillor when our county council adopted Eventbrite as its partner to run the booking system for our local tip. I now see that I was lucky!
No, it’s much the same as your council’s booking system with timed slots: but, magnanimously, you don’t have to pay for the privilege. Not even a booking fee. Yet.
Just the tip?
Quite simply Government (and by that I mean Westminster) isn't doing its job. Parliament should legislate for a standardise nationalised recycling scheme that everyone a abides by and understands. Recycling is one of umpteen issues where they're too politically cowardly to take action and own an issue. If they won't own an issue, local government certainly won't.
Here in Newark the district council collect the waste and the county council dispose (burn/recycle/bury) the waste.
One of the problems is that County signed a 26 year PFI contract in 2006 with almost no flexibility.
In the end the district are doing their own thing with glass collected once every 8 weeks curb side.
That said out tip is reasonably good, whilst you should pre register your vehicle, you don't need to book slots and unless you are on your third visit of the day no one is asking questions.
"Until a party steps forward with a genuine plan to change this, people aren’t going to get any happier..."
I mean, this is spot on, but when the answer to your question is "member of the electorate, you cannot expect a Continental level of public services, at American levels of taxation, so please choose one or the other" what is the likelihood we'll get a resolution any time soon?
Dan Niedle published data during last year's GE campaign highlighting that on average a UK taxpayer is willing to pay an additional £10 quid in tax to enhance the provision of public services. Generosity embodied.
Except there's 1000s of easy ways to make life better for the public (like, for instance, just allowing people to use the tip like they used to) which don't require increased taxation.
Unfortunately you're wrong. Respectfully. I was responsible for implementing this same system in a neighbouring local authority. The system saved £200k per year. Why? For various reasons: people not living in the area weren't able to use the facilities; commercial operators were prevented from using the facility; an electronic system meant the tip could operate with one less FTE delivering a saving. Etc etc.
I'd be eager to hear some of your other many 1000s of examples of easy, cost free, suggestions.
Saved for who though? The saving was made on the time spent by people having to book appointments beforehand. What about commercial operators fly-tipping, pushing the costs down the line (or merely asking their customers to do the tip run for them etc)?
Other suggestions to make life a bit easier? I used to be able to use my leisure centre. Now if I am member it is cheaper. How do I become a member? By applying for a card. Can I get the card at the centre? No...
What do you mean? The borough' taxpayers who pay for the operation of the tip through their council tax... That's who saves from the electronic system.
On fly tipping, you're excusing fly-by-night commercial operators who have such disdain for their locality that they're willing to dump rubbish on the side of the road. In any event, criminals will dump rubbish on the road side regardless of the options available to them. Whether there's a free service available. That's the nature of a criminal, they can't be bothered to play by the rules. Visit a facility, why bother, when their is a local roadside.
I can't comment on your obscure point about a membership card at your leisure centre. Needless to say, my point stands. If residents want to see tangible improvements, there are sacrifices to be made. Either way higher taxes, or identify which services are no longer valuable. Lots of services are elsewhere in the world chargeable unlike here. Single best example is social care and healthcare, both free in the UK.
I fear you missed my point. I don't deny that from the LA's perspective an electronic booking system is "better", but from a user perspective it is more hassle. As a user, it is not a tangible improvement to have to book an appointment, create an account etc. There are lots of little examples like this where a service was once X and is now Y, and X was "better" for the user (albeit with unseen costs).
My wider point is "If residents want to see tangible improvements, there are sacrifices to be made. " a) are there tangible improvements to me, b) why should I sacrifice?
Why should you sacrifice? Because you're an adult who understands that everything in life has a cost. Economis 101.. So you have to decide which you prefer: (a) higher taxes, which is unattractive to everybody or (b) less or worse public services. The other option, (c), is that UK Plc continues to borrow to meet the shortfall (deficit). Interest costs now run at £100billion per annum. Option (c) is short termist and unsustainable.
Returning to the narrow point of the tip, if residents want the convenience of a turn-up-at-anytime tip service, that's perfectly reasonable and understandable. But there's a cost to this, soooo...they need to choose. Do they want to pay an extra fifty pence on their council tax per year to pay for this enhanced service.
If you'll indulge me a second comment, my gut feel is that you have to go through all that palavar because they want to prevent commercial businesses using the tip for free. But given cut backs, councils have cut funding in enforcing the laws on disposing of commercial waste (hence why fly tipping seems to be getting worse as well). But ultimately that cost is still there, it is passed on to us through the painful and long process you describe. That results in people having to less of their working hours working and more on dealing with 'life admin'. See also having to wait an hour at the GP for a 5 minute appointment.
Yeah, my big frustration is now they have a guy at the tip they're paying to stand there and check people's phones, whereas before they had people there who could just stop a commercial vehicle on the way in, so it's not even clear that it's stopping anything, it's just sort of theatre.
In my neck of the woods (not far from you), we had to separately recycle 'white' paper from 'brown' paper. If you put an empty loo roll with a scrap of toilet paper on it, your recycling was "contaminated" and would not be collected. Instead you were to drive your recycling to the tip or just dump it in your waste bin. Somehow COVID-19 made it possible to recycle both 'white' and 'brown' paper together. Magic really.
And people are totally shocked at the growth in fly-tipping when getting rid of rubbish becomes so much harder. And charged for doing it legally.
This made me cry 😢 with laughter and my own private recycling anguish. 👏
Absolutely spot on about how the decline of the public realm and basic services is driver of distrust in all government and mainstream parties. Why trust politicians on the big issues when they can't do bins properly. Ex Council employee and I loved your description. I had to try to explain to people why services cut while taxes going up.
Great stuff. I was appalled, when moving to a house for the first time, rather than being in a flat, at how infrequent rubbish collections are - especially landfill, where they seem to give you am aggressively small bin and expect it to last two weeks. It’s surely, surely worse for carbon emissions for everyone to be separately carting their rubbish to the tip than to have a handful of trucks picking it up!
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.
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?
I mean, not to sound up myself but my partner has a PhD from Oxbridge and I'm also moderately clever and if we didn't spot this for literally years, what chance do most people have??
And to think I moaned to my local councillor when our county council adopted Eventbrite as its partner to run the booking system for our local tip. I now see that I was lucky!
That is astonishing - what was the deal, go to the tip and see a show?
No, it’s much the same as your council’s booking system with timed slots: but, magnanimously, you don’t have to pay for the privilege. Not even a booking fee. Yet.