Recycling - Taxation by another name

For some years here in Derby we have dutifully been recycling our waste, with one of our bins being a brown bin for garden waste and food leftovers.

Derby City Council have now had a rethink on the process and in a leaflet that was delivered with our new larger blue bins (more below) they dropped in a small section about the brown bin collection.

They tell us that next year they will charge for collection of the brown bin.  Of course they blame the government, to quote the leaflet

'This is because of government cuts to our budget which means we have no choice but to stop providing some services for free. This will allow us to protect other services such as children's centres, care homes and libraries'

I have two objections to the above statement:

Firstly they were not providing the service for free, waste collection is part of what I pay my council tax for.  I won't see a reduction in the council tax but an additional charge for a service I have already paid for!

Secondly they are still cutting the services they claim this charge is to protect - work that one out.

It gets better however.  If I don't want to pay the charge I can opt out of having my bin collected - I am sure the administrative costs there will not be trivial, and if say 50% of households do so across the city then it is likely there will be no cost savings as the bin wagons and their crews will still be needed for the other 50%.  Furthermore I am told that if I don't want my bin collecting I can put the waste I presently recycle in with the non recyclable waste so it can go to landfill - where is the sense in that?

There also seems to be a retrograde step with the blue bins.  To date we have had a small blue bin for plastics, glass and cans.  This has now been replaced with a larger bin into which we can also add the paper and card previously collected in a blue bag and orange bag respectively.  I hope this is because it is more cost effective to sort it at the depot but nothing has been said.  Is there some other reason?  Is it being recycled at all?

This also leaves us with our old small blue bin.  These are to be collected in or we can do a bit of 'Blue Peter' and turn them into composing bins!  I trust if collected in they will be recycled but once again I have my doubts.

There appears to be no coherent approach to recycling - but a very clear plan to extract yet more money from the captive taxpayer!

London Olympics 2012

We hear in the news that yet more of our money may be required for the 2012 London Olympics.

This is a ridiculous waste of public money.

Jobs are being lost in the public sector, services are being reduced, taxation is increasing.  Why are we not capping the spend on the Olympics?  We cannot afford to spend any more and it looks like a number of the promised benefits may well not be realised.

During the Olympics it appears that travel in London will become much more difficult as the public transport system struggles to cope and the roads become more congested, especially in areas where there are the special lanes for competitors and VIPs.

This will have the most impact upon those who live and work in London and is likely to be rather disruptive.

So what benefits will we get:

Increased tourism? Possibly not as many have announced they will not visit due to the expected congestion so we will find the visitors to the games will merely replace those who are no longer comings as tourists.

New facilities? Maybe but the Velodrome is rather specialised, the Aquatic Centre is similar and the main stadium is probably going to be sold or given to a football team and used for little else.  Remember the Millennium Dome, now the O2 Arena, which cost the taxpayer a fortune before being more or less given away.

Improved transport? Better links to an area where many will not wish to go - great!

The London Olympics is just a case of trying to show off to the rest of the world.  We should never have looked to host the Olympics and given that we have no way to back out, we must keep a lid on the costs before it cripples the country.