Proposed increases in waste collection fees

[legalalien]

Have been watching the video of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting going through the next year’s council budget.

The proposal is to increase the annual charge for garden waste collection from £40 to £60 and the bulky waste collection fee from £25 to £35 per booking.

Some interesting discussion about the potential for this to create an increase in fly tipping here at about 1:31

A little earlier there’s some discussion about moving to some sort of “needs based” approach to scheduling of waste collection which is sold as enabling increased collection in eg night time economy areas, but against a background of cuts to overall budgets, makes one wonder if standard residential collections might reduce. Let’s see....

[jazzer]

The quoted garden waste collection fees are still 30% cheaper than Lewisham.

Perhaps the charge should be the same across all 35 London Boroughs and agreed annually by an Ombudsman.

[Penguin68]

Perhaps the charge should be the same across all 35 London Boroughs and agreed annually by an Ombudsman.

Why? Or perhaps, why have separate boroughs at all? Or democratic decisions by elected representatives? Central decision making by the apparat; a command economy; - where does that remind me of? (Apart from the current Mayor's bailiwick). Perhaps our tanks could start rolling over Kent in a land-grab (which is what the ULEZ expansion seems to feel like to the outlying suburbs anyway).

[Nigello]

If we must have a mayoralty, scrap the boroughs and go for a GLA-redux. Local differences and needs would of course need to be honoured and local councillors would be there still. As for costs, richer areas could subsidise poorer ones in a GLA-wide tax system.

[Spartacus]

If we must have a mayoralty, scrap the boroughs and go for a GLA-redux. Local differences and needs would of course need to be honoured and local councillors would be there still. As for costs, richer areas could subsidise poorer ones in a GLA-wide tax system.

 

On the surface, this would be a massive cost saving as you would have centralised department's doing what is currently done in each London council. It would also allow cross Borough working to occur but I suspect there would be issues. Let's look at the way that North and South of this borough are treated where more focus occurs in the North of the borough. Imagine how similar disparity may occur between central boroughs and the outer boroughs if we had a centralised single council.

I could of course be wrong but I suspect areas that generated more finances would get more focus.

[legalalien]

Just started watching the next instalment of this meeting ( Tuesday evening, following the all day Monday meeting) and it starts off with Cllr Chamberlain deriding some sort of climate change impact analysis that he’d asked about the whereabouts of the previous day. Based on his description it’s not worth the paper it’s written on and is critical of the bulky waste charge. It doesn’t seem to have been published on the website yet. Will report back if any further developments in the meeting :)

[legalalien]

Apparently there was some other “late” document from the Equality and Human Rights Panel saying that the equalities impact assessment that was done is insufficient/ inadequate. Which is a problem for the scrutiny process. Wow.

The committee are going to flag the issue to the cabinet. Again can’t see the document anywhere but hopefully will be posted online in due course. There’s some suggestion that the document has always been intended to be ready for cabinet but not necessarily for the scrutiny committee. Everyone seems more than a little nervous.

Apparently the equalities panel received the budget on Friday evening for a Monday turnaround. See from around 17 mins in particular, but worth watching from the start