Fenland District Council “brown bin” petition presentation speech

Yesterday (16:00, Thursday 15th September 2016) I presented the 1,622-strong garden waste petition to an all-councillor meeting at Fenland District Council. Here is what I said.

I stand before the members of the council with a petition. A petition against the proposed charges for brown bin collections, which has garnered over 1,600 signatures.

As we’ve seen from the rise of UKIP and the turmoil in the Labour Party, there is currently a deep resentment amongst the public against “the establishment” at both a national and local level. In times of austerity and cut-backs, people don’t recognise their politicians as people who work for them.

While people’s incomes have sustained a prolonged period of stagnation, council taxes have risen. As those taxes have risen, services have been cut. As people see the tangible benefits they get from their council tax — from grass cutting to highway maintenance — slipping away they begin to further distrust those politicians.

Nothing could be closer to the truth in terms of your proposed charges for garden waste collections. Fenland charges the highest rates of council tax in Cambridgeshire. The Fenland portion of council tax on a Band D property is more than £250 per year. This is £69 a year more than the next closest council, Cambridge City, and — shamefully — double the £125 a year charged by South Cambs. Your garden waste tax effectively increases this already inflated level of taxation by another 16%.

Councillors might argue that this only represents 70p a week, but this is a 70p a week increase on top of a charge that many in Fenland are already struggling to afford, especially with the proposed cuts to Council Tax Support.

At the seminar in July it was stated that the council expects over 65s to sign up to this scheme in the highest proportion. This seems obvious. They are the people least likely to have the transport to get to the local recycling centre, and the people least likely to have the mobility or good health required for home composting. In some parts of Fenland, Age UK offer garden maintenance services to older residents who cannot do this themselves. As well as paying for the garden maintenance services, those residents will also now have to pay for the brown bin to take the waste away. When the government increased the pension rate to £119.30 pensions minister Ros Altmann said pensioners had “done their best for society, worked hard, and we owe them”. What was given with one hand is being taken away with the other. This is a charge that will disproportionately hit the worst-off the hardest.

I don’t know whether or not the council has carried out an Equality Impact Assessment yet, however in July councillors were told that this would only take place after the consultation had closed. I suggest that this impact assessment will therefore either be a complete whitewash, or else the council will have risked wasting almost £14,000 of taxpayer’s money on a consultation about a scheme their impact assessment said would be unviable. Which is it?

It has been reported that there were over 7,000 respondents to that £14,000 consultation. I believe that this was money wasted. A true consultation would have put various money saving options before residents. Instead the survey asked a series of questions that could be used by the council as arguments to support the new charge — regardless of how people answered those questions. I very much doubt that it would have passed as a piece of GCSE mathematics coursework, and I think that the council should be ashamed of this. This is even more galling given that the council spent nearly £10,000 of taxpayer’s money on a previous survey asking residents which areas of council spending they thought would be acceptable to cut. Bin collections were 19th out of 19. The council ignored that consultation, and engineered the new one so that it was guaranteed to support their case. It was a sham.

The consultation asked residents what they would do with their garden waste. They failed to give residents options like “fly-tip it”, “burn it”, “leave it in my garden” or “hide it in my green bin”. You might think this a ridiculous suggestion, but the questionnaire should have reflected the things people do in real life… especially since the scheme throws up all sorts of logistical anomalies. You’ll be allowed to put cut flowers from the shops into the green bin, but not cut flowers from your garden. If you have no garden but want your real Christmas tree taken away then you have to pay for a whole year of garden waste collections. This confusion will undoubtedly result in an increase in landfill waste.

In Peterborough they saw landfill waste increase by 2,300 tonnes across a five-month period. This increase was almost identical to the drop in waste in the food and garden waste recycling bins. The council found that 45% of the contents in their landfill bins was “recyclable organic matter”. Matter which would go in residents’ garden waste bins. This increase in landfill waste cost Peterborough an additional £118,000 over a five month period. I’d argue that this was low because of Peterborough’s waste to energy facility. In Fenland, the landfill tax alone over those five months would cost more than £200,000.

Is it really fair that those paying for brown bin services will end up subsidising others to send recyclable waste to landfill? The proposed scheme does not work. It’s bad for residents and bad for the environment.

I’ll finish by warning councillors not to dismiss these 1,600 signatories. The number may be small in comparison to the 7,000 consultation responses — but I did this with absolutely no funding. Imagine how many signatures I would have collected if I’d been able to spend £2 per response like Fenland has.

Things have been quite good for councillors in Fenland up until now. Some of you have held or gained your seats with no opposition. Many others have faced very little opposition. If councillors keep riding roughshod over residents then that may change in the future.

Please scrap these proposals, which only serve to harm the people of Fenland and our environment.