In a debate on the green waste collection charge last night, Tory councillors yet again failed to come up with a fully costed alternative to the charge. 

Last September, the Tories claimed they could “save millions” by collecting bins from early in the morning until as late as 10 o’clock at night. But officers have now assessed the plan and worked out that far from saving money, it would cost over £50,000 per year more than making no change at all – and still leave the council with a budget hole of over £1million.

At last night’s meeting, the Tories first stood by their outrageous accusations that officers had been pressured into writing a biased report. on their proposal. They then went on to suggest dropping the charge in favour of a vague request to ask the council’s waste contractor to be more efficient.

Speaking afterwards, Councillor Claire Young, the Lib Dem spokesperson on waste, said, “No one wanted to introduce the charge, but if we remove it we will have to find another way of making the £1.1m of savings each year it represents. That’s before we even start on the £2.7m of additional annual savings that have to be made in the waste budget in the coming years. ”

“The Tories’ previous proposal has been shown to be a moneywaster, this time they haven’t even tried to come up with anything specific. The council already asks SITA for efficiencies whenever the contract is renegotiated. The Tories had no idea of how much could be saved or what effect it would have on the service to residents.”

At the meeting, Cllr Mike Drew reminded the Tories that all parties agreed at the Resources sub-committee on 12^th May 14 that “if any projects proposed are not progressed then alternative proposals (savings or generation of additional income) must be sought to ensure that the council’s future budget remains sustainable”. Therefore, if any group wished to reverse the introduction of the garden waste charge, they would have to find an alternative for the savings, currently expected to be £1.1m this year plus the additional costs of reversing all the service changes brought in recently.

Cllr Young added, “There has been a lot of scaremongering about the impact of the charge. The Tories claimed it would put lives at risk by massively increasing the use of Sort It centres – it hasn’t. They said the implementation costs were spiralling out of control – they weren’t. They said take up was poor – it has exceeded expectations. They said there was a spike in green waste fly tipping – and tried to back this up by posing beside a pile of waste that included concrete fence posts! In fact we were told last night there were only 8 cases of green waste fly tipping in April.”

Officers advised councillors they didn’t have the information needed to vote to abandon the green bin charge. After 3 hours of debate a unanimous agreement was reached to ask officers to bring back further reports on making efficiency savings and the implications of abandoning the charge.

Cllr Young said, “We would all be delighted to find an alternative that didn’t involve charging and didn’t lead to cuts in this or other services, but given the scale of the savings needed I am not hopeful. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend tax payers’ money reversing the charge now only for it to have to be brought in again when we have to make further savings.”

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