Forum Topic

Mahfouz is talking rubbish

With this tweet Labour’s Cllr Bassam Mahfouz demonstrates that he does not understand the service that he is in charge of.  Sorry, I couldn't resist the title.  When the council works out participation rates for re-cycling it sends a man or woman with a clipboard down your street.  They tick the number of re-cycling boxes or pink re-usable bags outside the houses in your street.  This number gets divided by the total number of dwellings to calculate a participation rate.  When Mahfouz says only 25% use the service he misunderstands completely.  We use the garden waste service 3 or 4 times a year.  The rest of the year everything goes in the compost bin.  It is only when we have a big day in the garden and the compost bins (we have two big ones) get filled up that we start on the re-cycling bags.  It is unlikely that we would have ever have registered in any survey of participation.  This is the greenest approach.  The bulk gets composted.  Peaks get handled by the re-cycling service.  Re-cycling all garden waste is pretty dumb.  Carting around stuff that can be composted in your back garden and used there is silly.  Labour’s new charge will change my behaviour.  Instead of using the garden waste service 3 or 4 times a year I will simply bag up my excess in black sacks and leave it out for the bin man.  Mahfouz’s changes will break something that works, reduce the recycling rate in the borough and cost money in additional land fill tax.  Labour needs to think again.  Threatening people that the only alternative is fortnightly collection of rubbish is just a form of bullying.  It is worth noting that the council has done well with its new contract for waste, street cleaning and grounds maintenance.  It makes good a rather poor contract made by the previous Labour administration when one of the executives of the contractor was a Labour cabinet member.  As a result the council is due to save £3.5 million from this contract.  The Labour cabinet has decided to snatch another £1.1 million.  They are pressing too hard on this universal service.  They should look elsewhere and stop threatening people.  A positive approach would be to educate people about compost bins and offer a free and easy system for collecting excess.  This would save the council money and maximise the best possible re-cycling - composting your own waste and re-using at home without any transport.  It does involve some heavy spadework every six months or so though! The £40 wheelie bins will ingrain a bad habit of "re-cycling" all garden waste.

Phil Taylor ● 5344d12 Comments

In July last year they decided not to extend the May Gurney contract and to go out to tender for the collections/street cleaning together with grounds maintenance as one contract.

Philippa Bond ● 5315d

I'm not doubting what anybody has written, but where is it stated that new contractors are taking over refuse/recycling collections in the borough?  And will the new contractors also be running the recycling centres (aka 'tips') from next April?  This is all news to me.

Andy Horridge ● 5323d

Michael,A big thankyou for this. There is a council scrutiny meeting tonight I think to discuss these proposals. The sad thing is that scutiny meetings are not designed to properly involve clever people like you or residents in general. This is a great pity because many residents have both wide and local knowledge. Any major changes especially to important schemes should involve the public at a formative stage. We used to have Area Committees designed to warn residents of changes in the pipeline and allow them to discuss the implications of these changes before they were set in stone. Hey and the public could almost cross-examine officers. Wow.

Arthur Breens ● 5323d

The New contractors use a 3 axle long wheelbase vehicle which is almost impossible to manouvre in small streets and regularly block streets for up to 20 mins in the areas they currently work.The wheely bin vehicles are even larger and may not even be able to negotiate small streets and will use assembly point collections.They also have a very high accident rate and a poor insurance payout rate.Their vehicles also do not meet Euro5 and are not hybrid or electric. ( But very few are to date)Amazingly the council officer I spoke to knew none of this. One would think that they would do the obvious, like I did. Go the the district they operate and watch.

Michael Brandt ● 5323d

Phil - Ok, I now understand that the 'specialist' vehicle that carries plastics and garden waste is going to be withdrawn, and plastics will be collected in the existing multi-use caged truck(s).  So what vehicle is going to collect the future 'optional' garden waste put out in wheelie bins (or other container)?

Andy Horridge ● 5324d

Andy,Well spotted.  Another change introduced by the Labour council is to get rid of the white sacks. In future plastics will be collected in the green bins and people will be given a "hairnet" to keep the plastics in the bin.  This way they can get rid of the specialist vehicle that currently does plastics and garden rubbish. These two moves wil reduce recycling rates.

Phil Taylor ● 5324d

Another thought regarding next year's £40 tax racket, er 'levy' for collecting garden refuse.  In my street, I notice that the same vehicle is used to collect plastics as well as garden refuse.  How can any financial saving be made by making a special case of garden refuse collection?  Or are the vehicles (and/or use of them) going to be changed next year?

Andy Horridge ● 5325d

May I suggest that Cllr Mahfouz stays in from his garden one night and watches 'How it's Made' on Quest channel one evening ( Free to View as well)He may learn a thing or two about what happens to all the garden waste that is collected from UK Authorities and how a tidy profit is also made from it..He may also learn about the environmental benefit of reducing hundreds of weekly vehicle movements to various local tips.It's the same as 72 seats on a bus removing 72 cars from the jam.Now when that was most successful was when a certain Labour leader reduced fares and increased services. Result : instant 12.5% move to public transport. The first and only time that has happened in such a volume.That was in GLC days and it's successors initiatives have cost far more to implement and operate and for a lower shift in habit. Population surge has more to do with it's current problems.The benefits of the garden sheme are wider than the balance sheets will ever show. Cllr Mahfouz has demonstrated that not for the first time his wisdom and vision does not extend beyond the school of ropey political accountancy

Michael Brandt ● 5344d

Phil, do you know if Bassam has a garden?It would seem that on the face of it, he is remarkably ignorant about gardening.

George Knox ● 5344d

My guess is that this is a prelude to fortnightly collection on both rubbish and recycle rubbish.  They eventually will state that the £40 option didn't work as our citizens refused to participate and, therefore, we no longer have a choice but to introduce fortnightly collection. They will say that it isn't their fault because they gave us a way out.  LOL

Charles Campbell ● 5344d

Well said Phil but Colm Costello beat you to the "Mahfouz is talking rubbish" quote. That said, it's worth repeating and rubbish is one of the cleaner words that crossed my mind!You have summarised exactly how the majority use their orange sacks. I don't compost but have two or three 'big clears' each year together with the occasional bag of lawn clippings which go on my neighbour's compost 'pile'.Like so may others then, will I be paying £40 to have a 'few orange bags full' collected? Let me think long and hard for a nanosecond before I say "NO". My grass clippings will go where they go at present and I will spew diesel emissions up the Greenford Road to the recycling centre for the rest(I do hope Mahfouz has planned for the extra capacity needed for the wheelie bin nay-sayers).Like so much coming out of the Town hall, this is a poorly thought through proposal which, of course, gives it the benefit of assuming that any thought was given in the first place.

Nigel Brooks ● 5344d

Well said Phil!

Jean F Fernandez ● 5344d