The Rise of the Wheelie Bin II

I see that Swale Borough Council intends to fine its residents up to £110 for leaving their wheelie bin out on the pavement for longer than they should.

It has, I read, identified "a number of bad bin hotspots" and this action is intended to clear the mean streets of Swale.

The fact that many residents have to commute to work, leaving early in the morning and not returning until early or mid evening, seems to have been left out of this equation.  Catching an early train probably means you'll leave your bin out the night before, and if you're not around to wheel it back in again, it hardly seems fair to come home to a £110 fine.

Still, it's another source of revenue for cash-strapped local authorities, still reeling from the Government's paltry funding settlement and threat of council-tax capping.

The customer is King

Good to see this week that the Hop Farm Country Park are seeking to recruit young people to a "mini board of directors". The job of these young people will be to meet regularly to decide what the newly-refurbished venue should offer to its young customers.

In these days of over-marketing, over-sophistication and over-complication, where marketing and PR gurus always assume they know what we want better than we do, it's good to see that someone is prepared to put the customer - even the young customer - first and actually ask them.

Well done the Hop Farm.

Let there be light - as long as it's low energy

After our wheelie bins, the latest target of government's green focus is our light bulbs. By 2011 shops will have to stop selling traditional bulbs in favour of the new low energy type.

Forget the fact that they're usually bulkier, heavier, and significantly more expensive.

In addition, it's come to light (excuse the pun!) in the last week that these new low energy bulbs can cause migraines and serious headaches for some people.

Add to this the fact that the new bulbs contain mercury. This could cause problems if they get broken in our homes, and when they expire and need to be thrown away, will constitute hazardous waste and doubtless need special (and expensive) processing.

All in all another informed, fully researched and well thought out Government initiative.

Not.

Bloggers of the world unite!

Spent some time this afternoon with a colleague of mine, Graham Gibbens. Graham is our Cabinet Member responsible for Public Health, which as you can imagine at the moment is a very busy area to be in.

All the more surprising then, that Graham has found time to start up his own blog site - http://grahamgibbens.wordpress.com.

If you're reading my blog, try and find a few moments to access Graham's site. He's a really hard working County Councillor for a ward in Canterbury, and I'm sure his blog postings will be interesting.

Good luck Graham!

The rise of the wheelie bin

In Tunbridge Wells, as in many other Council areas up and down the country, our dustbin was replaced by two ugly wheelie bins which were emptied half as often - once a fortnight. With me so far?

The reason for this was that Councils up and down the land could comply with yet another set of Government performance indicators around recycling. So residents who for years had composted their green waste now put it in a wheelie bin so that the Council could take it away and compost it for them - albeit adding hundreds of green miles in the process.

These wheelie bins mutliplied overnight - first a green one, then a brown one. The logic behind the colours was obvious - we put our our non-green waste in the green bin and our green waste in the non-green bin. Of course - simple. Could be worse. If you lived in Liverpool, your wheelie bin would be purple - then where would you be?

However, in Tunbridge Wells we should consider ourselves fortunate indeed. I see from the national press that some Councils are insisting on collecting refuse only from "standard" wheelie bins. Householders who do not have a "standard" wheelie bin are being charged up to £60 for one to be delivered.

The interesting thing is that householders who drive to their local Council's depot to collect the aforementioned "standard" wheelie bin themselves and thereby avoid the £60 charge are being turned away.

Mere taxpayers cannot be trusted to collect their own wheelie bin, under the Government's comprehensive Health and Safety legislation. Qualified Council staff must deliver these complex items of waste control technology - charging £60 for this highly technical mission.

This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that our Government have capped Council Tax rises at 5% leaving local authorities with less money and higher costs? Or would it?

Consistency is everything

With around one in ten of the world's population possessing some kind of disability, and this figure set to grow substantially with the advance of clinical technologies and the ageing process, the way our society treats the disabled has never been more important.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the very first global human rights legislation of the twenty first century, proposing fair and equitable treatment among those countries who agree to be bound by its contents.

However, the Government of one country has so far refused to sign up to the legislation.

Best guesses could include Kenya? China? Some Eastern European state?. You'd be wrong.

It's us - the UK, whose Labour government was so fanatically over-eager to embrace every last aspect of human rights legislation, leaving our businesses and public services to suffer daily organised abuse from those who "play the system".

Consistency in New Labour? We're still looking...

Happy New Year!

This year, we thought it would be great for my daughters to experience New Year's Eve in London, so we drove up to town around 10pm, and walked across London Bridge and towards Westminster.

I was struck by so many different nationalities all heading for one celebration. I heard from someone next to me that 350,000 had joined us in the capital, so we were in good company!

We were just past Blackfriars Bridge at ten to midnight and thought it best to stay where we were rather than push any further. At the stroke of midnight, the barges of fireworks were lit, and for the first thirty seconds the display was incredible - then the breeze blew the smoke from the fireworks down river and we couldn't even see the lights on the other side of the Thames!

So 2008 began, and we couldn't have wished for a happier start to the year. My kids, exhausted but cheerful, walked back to Tower Bridge then slept all the way home in the back seat of the car!