Green bins

Green bins for garden waste were introduced by South Kesteven District Council in 2005 in an attempt to persuade home owners recycle their garden waste. There was a £15 charge for the bin initially but this was increased to £26 in 2010.

The discretionary scheme was a tremendous success and by 2011 a total of 27,000 households had a green bin in which to dump their grass, hedge cuttings, weeds, leaves and discarded plants. They were emptied fortnightly although in the autumn of 2011 this frequency was changed to monthly during the winter in an attempt to cut costs.

But in January 2012, the council announced that it proposed to charge home owners an additional £25 a year to empty the bins, part of an economy drive as a result of local authority budget cuts throughout the country caused by the economic crisis. An increase in council tax would be unpopular because the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, had said that councils had a moral duty to impose a freeze to help families struggling with rising household costs although some local authorities were refusing on the grounds that they must raise more income and this was seen by SKDC as a possible solution.

The council told the Stamford Mercury (January 27th) that if 80% of the existing green bin households agreed to pay more, the £500,000 a year cost of running the service would be covered and it would be able to freeze the council tax at current levels for 2012-13. The authority claimed that the proposed green bin charge was part of a series of consultation events the previous summer when householders said that they would rather pay it than see collections axed but this was unknown to most people and no one came forward to say that they had been asked such a question.

The council's proposal brought an immediate protest from home owners who claimed that the £25 levy was in reality an increase in the council tax and a selective one at that which would apply to half of the 55,000 households across the district. The newspaper reported that if the new charge did go ahead, 27,000 householders would have to pay £35 in the first year and an annual charge of £25 thereafter. Those who refused to pay would have to dispose of their own waste, the alternative being a household recycling centre which, in Bourne, is based in Pinfold Road.

Complaints about the proposal were made in the correspondence column of the Stamford Mercury and in a hard-hitting coverage by the Grantham Journal (January 27th) which condemned the levy as "a stealth tax". The report also included a wave of protest letters in which furious readers said that it was aimed at good citizens anxious to do their bit for the environment and the headlines warned that the public had "declared war" on the council for its misguided proposal which penalised home owners for embracing an environmentally friendly service and one that would hit pensioners the hardest because they were the keenest gardeners.

The newspaper said that the levy would victimise people with gardens and fly tipping would spiral out of control as readers complained that they were already paying too much for too little from the waste and recycling collection service and would not be “held to ransom" which the newspaper's editorial claimed that everyone had been deceived.

"Duped into paying for THAT green bin under the illusion that the local authority wanted us to fill our eco-friendly receptacles with compostable mulch”, said the editorial, “when all the while the sneaky bean counters were planning to have us fill them with our hard earned CASH. It frankly beggars belief that under the Big Society banner, councils across the country are asking just a handful of their tax payers to plug their leaking coffers."

The newspaper also reported that anyone who did not wish to pay the levy could not claim back the money they had been forced to pay for the green bin in the first place. "That was for the bin, delivery and administration", said a council spokesman. "The proposals are not to refund those who opt out of the service."

In an effort to defend the green bin collection charge, the council leader, Councillor Linda Neal, issued a statement saying that all councils were having to cope with massive reductions in the grant they received as the government was striving to reduce the national deficit and some had been forced the make major cuts in services and impose large scale redundancies. "Our response has been to search for even more savings and introduce innovative ways to serve local people so that we are able to put forward a budget which will allow us to freeze the council tax and there will be no cuts in services", she said. "Against this kind of background, I believe that a charge for green waste collection that averages out at less than 50 pence a week over a full year is a small price to pay."

WRITTEN JANUARY 2012