A Rubbish Christmas

You may already have read here my not so favourable view of local Government, and in particular here, of the waste collection services. Apparently the culprits have not all read my rantings, spread the word and mended their ways. In fact, I'm not entirely sure they have even been reading my blog.

You may be in one of the areas that have not had rubbish collection for up to 4 weeks. If you do, you have my sympathies. And probably rats. The silver lining though will be the 1/12 rebate of the £1000-2000 or so you pay a year in council tax for this service. Ah, if only it were that simple. As usual, a quick glance at the real world (private sector) reveals the imaginary one to be just that - a fantasy for them, or a nightmare for us. Unfortunately, as previously discussed, it is not one we can do much about.

If you employed a private company to come and get your rubbish, even the most rudimentary contract would have got you your rebate over the Christmas collection failure. If you don't do what you are paid for in the real world, you don't get paid. People take their business elsewhere. But again, you can't go to a better local council to provide your services, you can't withdraw your money and go private. Nope, you're stuck with it, you can't haggle for a discount or move your custom when they turn out to be crap. How much would private traders pay for that kind of lock-in? Gotta love the system.

Yes, drives, street corners and alleyways across the country are littered (I couldn't resist) with bags of uncollected rubbish (though they could hardly be littered with collected rubbish). Many local councils stopped collections because their binmen might slip in the snow and ice. In work boots. I have a pair, they are to walking on ice what a Land Rover is to driving on it. So, here we are with no collections for weeks.

The incredible incapacity of local Government to carry out even the most basic of tasks was typified by one Kevin Mitchell, Birmingham City Council's assistant director of fleet and waste management: "It is a triple whammy. This all happened during Christmas, with three Bank Holidays and 420,000 extra turkey carcasses to collect." Yes Kevin. Sometimes it snows at Christmas. It might be an idea to have some form of bad weather plan, if you are a multi-million pound service supplier. The calendar is also reasonably predictable. Or totally. Even if we grant that until his trade union sent him his 2010 calendar for Christmas 2009 he didn't know Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day would all fall on weekends, that still gave him a year. Oh, and as with all the Christmas Days for quite some time, lots of turkeys will be eaten, but it's still just lunch or dinner. People don't eat it as well as their 'normal' meal so there is not vastly more waste than any other lunch or dinner really.

I think we've pretty much flogged this one to death, but you just know that for all the talk of lessons learned that we will undoubtedly hear when they bother to come back to work, it will just be talk. Seeing as local Government is now amending its end of the deal as council tax rockets whilst services are cut, maybe we should start amending our end. Opt out anyone? It is all well and good the Tories talking of decentralisation of power, but a glance at what some of the likely recipients of new powers are already doing doesn't make for pretty reading. Small Government is a good thing, but before we hand power out to local Government, it needs root and branch restructuring.

Local Council and its Rubbish Service

I pay my income tax. It's not an altruistic thing; a computer does it for me to avoid the moral dilemma of whether or not to lie to the taxman. I do, though, have to send off an eye-wateringly large amount to my local council once a year. As the banking genius who invented switch (remember that) discovered, people don't mind spending money if the folding greenery never touches their sweaty palms, and the reverse is true too; if you have to fork it over, it hurts. Now when I get a meal in return for my hard(ish) earned readies, or a pair of warm and colourful socks, it eases the pain. You have to look a little harder, though, for what you get in return for things like taxes, and in particular council tax.

Here in deepest darkest Oxfordshire we're big into our recycling. Cool. Groovy. Saving the planet one plastic bottle at a time. So, I get a green bin and a black bin - recycling and non-recycling. I noticed that everyone else seemed to have a brown bin too. My interest piqued, I called the council and discovered it to be the garden waste variant. This was good news - my neighbours are catching on to me throwing my hedge and lawn clippings over the fence. So I asked for one.

£40. Per year.

Yup, I have to rent a bin from them. Can I buy one - I checked online, they're about £40? Nope, gotta rent our one. Any particular reason? Does my identically shaped brown bin not fit on the collector? The rules. Of course. Silly of me to ask. While we're on silly questions I then ventured to enquire why this brown bin was not included in the £2000 or so council tax. Simple, councilman told me. It wouldn't be fair on the people without gardens. Glad we got that one sorted, easily one of the more pernicious inequalities in the world. Imagine having to pay for something you don't use. Like a £200 billion welfare state. Make those frivolous mowers of lawns pay for their own Bacchic excesses.

Anyway, despite my dismay at the money grabbing dolts doing their bit to encourage garden waste fly-tipping (though that would probably end up as rather useful compost) I bravely forked out the cash. That was 2 months ago, and still no sign of my bin. I have called up a few times asking as to its whereabouts. Apparently it is a very complex process, sticking a label on a bin, putting it on a van and driving it to my house. So the company entrusted with the job (on a non-negotiable 7 year contract) has fallen a little behind. Amazing how efficient the billing department is of these organisations. If only the rest of them would take note, we might get somewhere.

Speaking of getting somewhere, I feel this post is not. Regardless, onwards I shall speed, blinded by a red fog of ire.

Unable yesterday to see my house from the road, obscured as it was by bin bags of fallen leaves and grass trimmings and less chance of my bin turning up than Lord Lucan, I ventured tip-wards. It's a good 30 minute drive so in the interests of my time and the planet in general I though fewer visits would be the order of the day. So I borrowed the oddly-named Hi-Lux, a half and half car/truck which is anything but luxurious but is certainly roomy in the boot. At the other end of my trip I found the half ork/half human breed who run the tip. A less affable or more charmless breed I have never encountered; bulky men who goose step up and down the site accusing everyone of being contractors disposing of industrial waste without the thought ever entering their minds to help out the 70 year old granny struggling with her old sewing machine. They're down there with the coffee drinkers.

To throw all these leaves away (which the council should have taken in my exorbitantly expensive brown bin), I must get my chit signed. Yup, because my car/truck looks commercial I can only dispose of household waste in it 12 times in 2 years. Oh, but the chap in the much larger Renault Espace next to me can visit as many times as he likes because his car looks more like a car. Good Friday afternoon at Oxfordshire county council that was. Money well spent. I'm beginning to see where fly-tippers are coming from.

So we're not cracking down on commercial waste dumping, just people who put their household waste in larger vehicles to make fewer runs thereby save time, energy, fuel, the planet, money etc. What on earth is the point in this rule? Coming up with that was someone's job. Then they had to pay to print off shiny chits for everyone. Bet that could have paid for my brown bin, wherever it is.

Rubbish Bombs

A slightly more light-hearted Saturday morning rant...

There exists the rather annoying problem of not having anywhere to throw one's rubbish whilst travelling by rail based transport. Since the Victoria Station and Bishopsgate bombs of 1991 and 1993, bins have very much receded from public places and in particular from stations, and understandably so.

Clearly there is risk analysis to be conducted here, and indeed there are currently many hundreds of opaque bins on the streets of London, maybe thousands. There are still though, relatively few places to throw rubbish when at a station. I'd like to see more of the bin comprising clear plastic bags and a frame from which they can hang - the media via between would-be litterers and would-be bombers.

Not exactly high level blogging but they can't all be...