| Topic: | Recycling rewards results. Gimmick or genius idea | |
| Posted by: | George Knox | |
| Date/Time: | 30/05/11 23:05:00 |
| Colm Welcome back to Ealing Today. We can see from the Ealing Times that Cllr Bassam Mahfouz says £231K has been saved by virtue of the initiative, and that after the awards and publicity spend we are still in the black. It seems from both Cllrs Costello and Taylor’s blogs that the general flavour of the experiment was not a good thing. Well if we have saved on landfill tax, then it was worthwhile overall. So there are now some savings which can be put forward to saving our Libraries. Separately if the winning Wards feel that strongly they could ask for some of their “winnings” to be put back to the library budgets. What the exercise has shown is we have firm evidence that those Western Ward peoples have some low standards. If they want something from the Council, like a new car park, then perhaps they should have to earn it by hoiking up their community behaviour standards, and so become more deserving citizens. I don’t know how many high rise dwellings there are in those wards where it is understandable that without proper management and encouragement from the Council and other Social landlords recycling standards are low. However when I sometimes visit Southall, I do see swathes of Victorian houses where recycling is easier to perform, just as I see in winning Hobbayne or Elthorne or clean Northfield. So in those Western parts there probably may be other reasons for low standards. However as it seems the Councillors of these Western parts have such a poor record generally in participating publicly in Borough wide activities (presumably taking their cue from MP Sharma who apparently very rarely ventures Eastwards with his body or emails), perhaps we shall never know. Must be hard for Bassam if he apparently gets so little support. I saw on somewhere like the BBC website recently that the UK still has the worst standards in Europe for recycling. So we shall have to do even better and experiments like these have their uses, provided that the Council grasps the nettle and continues to cajole more and more people, in the parts where the sinners are more numerous, until they fall in line. Improvements of course would have to be published Ward by Ward. |