Green Bin charges, how did we end up here ?

Like many people in Tamworth I am not happy with the implementation of charging for garden waste to be collected. Yes I did vote for this in full council only a few months ago but this wasn’t a “put your hand up when you’re told we need this” it was in fact the position I had come to after many hours of contemplation and thought right up until just before the council meeting began. I thought that now the charge is imminent I’d share my thought processes.

Before I do I will just list a couple of facts about the charge.
1, the fee is £36 and this covers the calendar year regardless of when you pay within the next twelve months the renewal/repayment date will be December 2018 for 2019. So if you pay in June you get 6 months not 12.
2, it’s an annual fee, £36 for the year (not per collection as some have thought)
3, no one has to pay, if you don’t use your green bin you don’t pay.
4, the green bin service will cost around £250kpa extra due to changes to credits, it’s expected council will collect around £500kpa from the charges and I’ll pick up on what happens to the excess later.

So as I said I thought about this a lot and where did we come from to get here.
When I grew up we had metal dustbin about 90l capacity and a separate lid, everything could go in here including ashes from the fire in the lounge ( I wonder how we didn’t lose the lids?), then a Councillor by the name of John Garner came along and we moved into a privatised system with big black wheely Bins, Eventthing went on but not got ashes, and these were emptied weekly,
Back in 2004 the then labour  council introduced a recycling scheme where black bins were empties fortnightly, dry recyclate was sorted curbside (in blue boxes and we did lose lids) and in Tamworth the green bin was born for garden waste and emptied fortnightly. Contract was signed for a July implementation at the May election there was a change of political leadership and the Conservatives were left as my neighbour at the time put it “getting the blame for something that’s not your fault”. Gosh remember the litter from curbside when the wind blew. This was also the time that John Garner came back on charge of waste management in Tamworth.

John like many of he conservative group was not happy with the fortnightly food waste collection and the curbside recycling methods, with John’s passion we had all sorts of presentations for invessel composting and the like where the council would buy the machinery and then sell the compost product afterwards. The financial return simply didn’t add up to cover the investment in the machinery. Ooh looks like someone has now recycled this idea and is claiming it as their own!!!! It didn’t stack up back then.

Anyway John found a solution and we moved to foodwaste in Black Bins and green, at last weekly food waste collections, but it was costing a fortune. John also lead us in creating the joint service with our neighbours in Lichfield, this was a cheaper service than external providers could supply and saw the end of the blue boxes from pre conservative days, we now had three big wheels Bins green black and blue. I remember these negotiations and remember the fight to keep the lichfield approach of charging for a second garden waste bin out of Tamworth.
In the history I’ve explained above the council had managed to negotiate actual millions of pounds worth of savings in the service and maintained the costs within everyone’s council tax bill.

This brings us to where we are now.
The costs of running services continues to increase as demand for different types of service increase and with the backdrop of reducing government hand outs to councils some difficult decisions have to be made. When I talk about increased demand I wan things like homelessness prevention and adult social care.
As I mentioned above changes to recycling credits will increase costs of the green bin service by around £200-£250k a year and is currently paid for by council tax contributions. Whether you use the green bin or not whether you live in a house of a flat your council tax is paying for those who use the garden waste collection service.
The council is expecting to generate around £500kpa from the charges, so half the charge pays for the service and generates a ‘saving’ in council tax expenditure and a the rest of the income will be used to support other vital service that we need to grow to support the vulnerable. There’s also some complex stuff about recycling credits in the coatings and surplus but the headline figures are about there.

So as ever where does the council get cash from? £80m budget with council tax income of £3.5m, it’s got to come from somewhere so things like industrial unit rents, non domestic rates contribution (after all other agencies have their cuts) car parks and charging for services, and this is where the decision came from. The collection of garden waste is not a statutory service and is therefore optional, the council have a number of options with it including continue as we are, cease the service, charge for it etc etc, in the same way the council charges for other services.

Wow that’s made it sound simple :(  I’m still not happy we’re going down this line but what are the other options? Savings into the hundreds of thousands have been built into the budget over the years and will be again this year, underspends will be made and rolled back into the next year, gone are the days of “have budget will spend before year end”. I don’t want to see any vital services reduced to support new pressures, so whilst I’m not happy with the green waste charges I realise something has to give somewhere.

So it’s a green bin and £36 bill for me, unless I share it with a neighbour and spend £18 each.




Written on my phone not spell or grammar checked yet