Eric Pickles complained loudly that councils cannot profit from waste collection services in light of concerns that a “small minority” were doing exactly that. But the failure to name and shame the culprits seemed at odds with the DCLG team’s passion for a media row. Could this be because they were all Tory controlled?
Back in April 2011, the DCLG published a letter saying:
“…councils cannot introduce ‘backdoor’ bin charging for mainstream waste collections or waste disposal. Such stealth taxes are not legal…”
Thanks to freedom of information requests, however, we can now examine the full list of offending authorities – and it makes for decidedly blue reading:
- Blaby District Council, in Leicestershire, charges £2 per bag, or £38.40 for a second bin.
- Eden District Council, in Cumbria, charges £1.25 per bag beyond a free allowance of 2 per week for households of under 6 members- and apparently has done for quite some while.
- Broxbourne Borough Council, in Hertfordshire, charges £0.30 per bag, beyond a 52 bag per year basic allowance.
- Wokingham Borough Council, one of the Tories’ flagship local authorities in Berkshire who are already planning to privatise library services, will be tonight voting through plans to introduce a £0.40 charge per bag beyond an 80 bag limitation.
Scrapbook wonders what Pickles thinks of his chums’ stealth-taxing ways?
3 Trackbacks
[...] in the course of my day job over at Political Scrapbook, we published this story about waste collection. The basic thrust of the story is a letter, from Bob Neil MP and Lord Henley [...]
[...] seems unlikely. It was reported that four councils (all Conservative) had opted to introduce a limitation and charge of this sort [...]
[...] But. Shouldn’t the ironing out have been done prior to implementing a wide-ranging and radical scheme. I find it hard to believe that this could have been devised without any thought of the impact, but it’s increasingly looking that way. Also, he claims that other councils have similar schemes. Which is true enough; but there are only three others, and they are all very controversial. [...]