| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Labour's new £1 million garden tax | |
| Posted by: | Bassam Mahfouz | |
| Date/Time: | 11/09/11 21:37:00 |
| I would like to clarify a number of points about the proposals we are having to make around Garden waste collections. Indeed over the next few years we are having to find £85m of savings as a council. Many of these have already been agreed and not documented at all because they will not impact on anybody including £1m by bringing the highways team in house from an outside contractor and taking other similar steps to reduce our budget with back of house savings. The bold decision we took of re-tendering and bringing together of our clean and green and parks maintenance contracts has meant a saving of over £3m – triple what we had hoped and genuinely meant a ‘more for less’ gain. However, given the depth of the cuts from central government we are having to make decisions that we simply would rather we didn’t have to make. The re-introduction of charged garden waste is one such decision. Considering all of the options available we decided that this had less of an impact than the alternatives. Over 70% of local authorities up and down this country have already moved to a system of forced wheelie bins and rubbish and recycling on fortnightly collections. The alternative to a return to a subscription based garden waste collection service would have been to introduce two forced wheelie bins to every household in this borough and fortnightly collection of rubbish and recycling. Such a decision would have brought about similar savings but clearly this is unacceptable to us as a council and you as members of the public who we serve. Given this tough decision we wanted to minimise the impact and so the proposals include: • One wheelie bin or 3 hessian sacks (as with the current system) as an option for each subscribing household • Those households who currently have to use the biodegradable bags will continue to use these (i.e. on red routes) • Discounts will be available for older people and those on low incomes • Payments can be spread by direct debt Alternatives include taking it to recycling centre directly or composting what you can at home. The system has been in place in Richmond and Kingston and there have been no reports that I have heard of in those areas of being fly-tipping or bonfire hotspots and their charges are above what we propose. Clearly it is not a decision that anyone will welcome, but when you are facing cuts that run so deep there is bound to be an impact on services and whilst many are going to fortnightly collection of rubbish and recycling across London and the country, we are trying to minimise the impact of these cuts as much as we possibly can. If anyone has any queries you are always welcome to contact me directly. Yours sincerely, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz Ealing Cabinet member for Environment & Transport twitter.com/BassamMahfouz bassam.mahfouz@ealing.gov.uk |