Who are the real bin bullies?

Oh dear.  The warm language of partnership expressed by the Coalition Government clearly hasn’t reached the territory occupied by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles.  Today, Mr Pickles unsurprisingly stamped on the previous Government’s attempt to allow local authorities the option of introducing charges for household waste collection to increase recycling by saying it is “time to rein in the bin bullies”[1].

It is a shame that this language continues to be used, as it does little to aid proper debate on waste and recycling.  The ‘bin bullies’ that Mr Pickles describes are the decent public servants in local government and government agencies who have been working hard for years to improve Britain’s recycling services and performance and helping to reduce carbon emissions.

In the rush to pronounce on this consistently hated (by Mr Pickles) policy (and in fairness to Mr Pickles he had indeed been consistent in his views on this issue) we do seem to have overlooked the principles of ‘evidence based policy’ and indeed ‘localism’ that the new Government have expressed.  If the Government are genuine about the desire to give local communities and authorities more power over decisions and spending, surely the consistent thing to do would be to allow councils the right to introduce charging for waste collection if they deem it appropriate for their locality?  Simply ruling it out altogether doesn’t seem consistent at all with the ‘new politics’, it sounds like yet another version of telling councils that Government wants to decentralise power, apart from when it suits Government not to..

As for the evidence, research conducted for Defra and previously for the Cabinet Office (when they reviewed waste policy in 2002/3) shows the effect across many OECD countries of ‘pay as you throw’ on reducing the amount of waste landfilled, increasing the amount of recycling and also reducing the total amounts of waste generated.  It shows that any issues about burning and fly-tipping of waste tend to be short term and minor, and manageable through sensible enforcement – very rapidly becoming a non-issue. As far as costs are concerned, fairly recent research for Defra even showed that PAYT could lead to a net reduction in waste collection costs for councils, while incentive schemes of the kind currently championed by the Government can lead to increases in operational costs.

For goodness sake, what is the problem with paying for waste collection by weight?  We pay for our telephones by length of call, we pay for electricity by the amount we use, and sometimes even water is paid for this way.  Systems can be designed to ensure those in greatest hardship are partially compensated and that levels of safe and sanitary waste collection are maintained.

I am not at all opposed to incentive schemes, they most certainly can have a place in the mix of policies needed to boost recycling and the pilots run so far are showing encouraging results.  But, there is a likelihood that simply giving people rewards to recycle only leads to more recycling of a higher underlying level of waste, rather than reducing waste at source.  In the US, these schemes all work in places where there are levels of consumption per capita of up to twice that of the UK level – a high consumption, high recycling society. Also, we need to consider how wide scale adoption of this policy will play with those who have already worked very hard to achieve good recycling levels – will they now have to simply pay out ‘incentives’ in order to collect the recycling they have already built up a commitment to –surely this will increase costs to local government?

Sadly though, it seems that debate on this issue is not possible, the Government has made up its mind.  The pity is that by portraying people in public service as ‘bin bullies’ the chance for dialogue and considered debate seems very slim, even non-existent.  And the daft thing is that it’s not as though there are hundreds of councils clamouring to introduce PAYT anyway – the Daily Mail and others (Mr Pickles included) have seen to that over the last couple of years by creating such a polarised climate on this issue and indulging in shameless misrepresentation of peoples’ considered views and research – some might even call it bullying....

PAYT is a policy that can work to reduce landfill, increase recycling and reduce overall levels of waste – but it is one important tool in a box of policy tools that would need to be sensibly joined together and not implemented in isolation.  It is such a shame that we can’t debate this sensibly, and that many councils may now even be bullied into a new ‘single policy’ approach around incentives, without the research and evidence to back it up.