PAY AS YOU DUMP 

Families who throw out more than one sack of rubbish each week are being forced to pay a controversial "bin bag tax". In a scheme which could soon be rolled out across the UK, dustmen will be ordered not to collect refuse unless it is left in official colour-coded bin bags provided by the council. Homes will be given just one free sack every week and must pay 28p for each additional bag, at least three times as much as an ordinary black bag from a supermarket.

That would leave a typical family producing four bags of rubbish a week paying £40 a year to their local authority on top of council tax. The scheme is the latest attempt by councils to crack down on residents who put out "too much" rubbish. One London borough introduced £100 on-the-spot fines for those who do not recycle enough and revealed that bin bag inspectors would be routinely be rummaging through dustbins to find offenders. Another half a dozen councils have introduced 'compulsory recycling' and are threatening residents with fines up to £1,000.

The bin bag tax scheme is being introduced Broxbourne Council in Hertfordshire, and is being closely watched by other authorities around the UK. They are desperate for new ways to avoid steep Government fines for producing too much landfill waste. In a letter to residents, the council says it will hand out 26 free purple bin bags branded with the borough's logo for the sixmonth scheme. Families who need more sacks have to buy them from the council for 28p each. A similar bin bag made from recycled plastic costs around 8p from a supermarket.

Locals will have four weeks to get used to the scheme, after that any black sacks put out will not be collected. Although the council hopes it will not be necessary to do so, householders who continue to put out their rubbish in black sacks or any other sack from the fifth collection onwards will risk enforcement action. This means fines of up to £1,000. Broxbourne says its plan is an alternative to the hated fortnightly collections where recyclables, such as cans and paper are collected one week, and food and other non-recyclables the next.

Like many councils, Broxbourne has only a limited doorstep recycling service. It collects glass bottles and jars, paper and cans, but not plastics, paper food packaging or foil. The government's Waste Strategy said councils should be able to bring in charges for rubbish collection and 'reward' householders who produce less waste. However, Broxbourne has yet to bring in any incentives for its active recyclers to offset the penalties paid by those who do not recycle enough. (Source: Daily Mail, Oct/07)

In a climbdown over the controversial 'pay-as-you-throw' bills, the Local Government Association said families should not have to pay extra taxes to get their rubbish collected. They said that new charges for collecting the bins should not be used to increase council taxes and they gave assurances that local bin collection taxes should never be introduced where public opinion is against them and that they must always go hand-in-hand with tough campaigns to stop fly-tipping.

A Government document advising councils to bring in fortnightly collections in the winter to minimise public protest has been withdrawn. Recently, the council bosses at the LGA called for powers to impose pay-as-you-throw charges, which they called save-as-you-throw, saying people should not be able 'to throw their rubbish away without worrying about the consequences'. Then they said nothing about guarantees that overall council taxes would be kept down and insisted that rubbish taxes would be 'fairer because if you throw out less you pay less.' LGA chairman Lord Bruce-Lockhart said, "The proposed blanket introduction of waste charging is unhelpful and unnecessary. It is vital that any authority thinking of introducing save-as-you-throw should first make sure there will be no overall increase in council tax, it has public support and measures are in place to prevent fly-tipping. The Association favours such initiatives only when a council has checked whether its own residents are happy with such a move."

A number of fortnightly collection schemes have been abandoned in the face of opposition from local residents. LGA officials said the pledge of no overall increase in council tax meant that a pay-as-you-throw tax should not increase the overall tax burden. Homes that recycled rubbish would pay less, while those that did not do so would pay more, but there would be no increase in the overall council tax. (Source: Daily Mail, Feb/07)

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has dropped plans for pay-as-you-throw rubbish taxes. He scrapped the scheme to make families pay to have their rubbish taken away less than 24 hours before Whitehall was due to make it official. The change on bin taxes came on a day when the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs released its consultation report which claimed four out of five of those polled were in favour of them.

He is understood to have abandoned the idea in the face of deep public disillusionment with fortnightly bin collections, bin police and other attempts to force householders to leave out less waste. The charges were backed by former Environment Secretary David Miliband, now Foreign Secretary, in a major statement of the government's policy on waste in May. The taxes were to be levied against those who left out more than a set weight of rubbish that could not be recycled.

DEFRA suggested the highest charge would be around £30 a year, although the town halls that would have operated the charges believed £10 a month was more realistic. There could also have been council tax cuts for those considered dutiful recyclers. More than 30 councils have already spent millions on fitting microchips in wheelie bins. These identify bins as belonging to a particular address, which can then be billed after dustcarts weigh rubbish collected from them.

The U-turn on rubbish taxes follows the decision this summer to back down on fortnightly rubbish collections. The government had been pressing councils to introduce once-a-fortnight pickups of perishable waste and enforce compulsory recycling schemes. More than 150 have done so. Over the summer ministers began urging councils to collect food waste at least once a week, recommending that it be collected from kitchen slopbuckets and that it might still be used for recycling.

Local councils, which face bills of £4billion over the next five years to pay for Mr Brown's landfill taxes and EU landfill penalties if they fail to recycle enough rubbish, had been pressing hard for a pay-as-you-throw tax. The PM said he was concerned that the scheme would be unfair for many families and difficult to administer. He believes that varying council tax rates depending on how much rubbish householders recycle or put out would also have created uncertainty in councils' annual revenues. (Source: Daily Mail, Oct/07)

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