A new charge for garden waste disposal doesn’t just affect homeowners, but they are right to slam it as a stealth tax on wealth.
By claiming it is only fair that people who use the service pay for it, the Labour-run council is cutting back on its core responsibilities and creating a two-tier public service.
Coming from a party that is currently debating new policy ideas including the four-day week, the move seems incredibly regressive and at odds with both Labour’s traditional principles and its increasing commitment to environmental causes.
The cause, as usual, is austerity, and the constant cuts by the Tory government to local authorities across the borough that leave councils, no matter what their political persuasion, forced to turn to alternative means of generating cash and making savings.
Perhaps, given a decade of cuts, it’s not so much surprising that charges such as this have been put in place, but rather that they’ve managed to stave it off until now.
Even worse, it seems they’re not going to come and get the bins from your bin compound area, we have to put them out on the pavement. fine for indvidual houses but not practical for shared blocks/flats. Ridiculous.
we don’t have visibility of big ticket expenditure so we can’t judge if spending there is wasteful. But we do see small scale wasteful expenditure for example messing around in some of our parks, replacing railings with “designer railings”, adding pointless flower beds and planted areas which are a mess for most of the year and even plantings that aren’t even visible to park users (just to adjacent housing eg in Pasley Park).
If the council were just a little smarter maybe savings on this kind of nonsense would preclude the need to create these new charges.
So we pick up the leaves and tidy our area,which the council don’t do and now we have to pay to do this,