Examination of Witnesses (Questions 56
- 59)
MONDAY 21 MAY 2007
CLLR PAUL
BETTISON AND
MR MARTIN
WHEATLEY
Q56 Chair: Can I ask you to introduce
yourselves, please?
Mr Wheatley: I am Martin Wheatley.
I am Programme Director of the Local Government Association dealing
with environmental issues.
Cllr Bettison: I am Councillor
Paul Bettison, Leader of Bracknell Forest and I am Chairman of
the LGA's Environment Board.
Q57 Chair: I am still not clear why
councils have moved towards alternate weekly collection unless
it is that making it more difficult for people to throw away their
residual waste is a form of pressure on individuals to recycle
more. Is that the main reason and could that be achieved other
than by only collecting the residual waste fortnightly which is
the issue that causes all the problems?
Cllr Bettison: Household waste
is a vital issue for all councils and of course nationally. It
is true to say that over the past decade or so councils have been
trying to encourage their residents to recycle. Some councils
have had significant success, typically those councils that are
better at communicating with their residents, and they have managed,
in some cases, to get good support from their residents to recycle
voluntarily sometimes by taking recycling to various bring sites
that will be located around the borough or district and in other
cases by actually arranging kerbside collection of recycling materials.
The move that some councils have decided to take in going to alternate
bin collection—ABCs, my authority uses that term and my
belief is that it is best done with bins for obvious reasons and
also because in my own authority part of the marketing of it was
"It's as easy as ABC"—invariably it puts a little
more pressure (as one of the last witnesses said) on people to
recycle. It is a fact that with what one might call the voluntary
recycling schemes that have been around in the past there are
some people who just did not participate. They either did not
believe that they should bother; they felt they were above and
beyond recycling; they felt that others should do it for them,
that they had paid their council tax. There are many urban myths
about recycling, one of which stems from the fact that many years
ago people saved waste paper for charitable causes because in
the old days charities used to make money out of recycling. Now
that the pressure is on for recyclates to be dealt with because
there is no shortage of recycling material rather now more a shortage
of processing for those materials, so the market has shifted.
People still believe that councils make a fortune out of recycling
so why do it, let the council sort it out. As we know, that is
just not true.
Q58 Mr Betts: Moving to the Lyons
Report, the LGA has been pressing very strongly for the right
of councils to charge for waste collection. That is what they
believe is right for their area. Is this not really a right for
local democracy that in practice is never going to be exercised?
Cllr Bettison: If the power were
to be given to local authorities to charge if they felt that that
would be beneficial for their area then I am sure that that power
would be exercised in a responsible way as are other powers that
local authorities have.
Q59 Mr Betts: If the total cost of
waste collection and disposal are about £150 for the typical
household in the country, even if you could get that cost down
by a third as a result of reductions in the amount of waste collected
and disposed of because people were encouraged in that direction
by the fact they had to pay for the collection, that would only
save £50 for the average household. Then when you add in
the administrative costs such as billing people, the disputes
you are going to have because of the complications in the system,
particularly if you start weighing the refuse that is disposed
of, the bad debts you are going to get, the write-off of bills,
the chasing up of those, it will probably cost you more than £50
a year just to do that.
Cllr Bettison: There are many
different systems in operation in Europe for charging differentially
for waste, some based on volume and others based on weight. The
LGA has not as yet done any investigations into the costs of running
different systems and indeed the LGA would undoubtedly do that
work if those powers were to be given to the member authorities.
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