Enough information to fill a blue bin

A couple of days ago I received among the more dubious of Lib Dem leaflets, which was masquerading as a National and Local issues survey. Actually, there was only one short and very general question on national issues and the rest of it was dedicated to stirring up local matters, which the Lib Dems usually achieve with some skill. None of the issues probed about was particularly surprising.

The one thing that did catch my eye though was question six, which asked people “Do you have all the information you need about the new food waste collections (starting January 2010)”? Apart from inviting the answer “no” and provoking a small degree of antipathy among voters, I’m left wondering what all this is about. In case the Lib Dems hadn’t noticed, a whole section of the Woking Borough Council website is dedicated to answering a myriad of questions on the service and it is also linked to on the homepage.

In addition, I had my caddies delivered today and there is included in the package an eight-page booklet that describes in more detail than you could ever need why the scheme is being introduced, how to use it, what can go in the bins and includes a tear-out calendar of collection dates. As a PR officer, I’m fairly certain that this covers most bases.

Anyone who still doesn’t have enough information on the scheme after that either has an unhealthy interest in the mechanics of waste collection or simply isn’t listening. To me, question six demonstrates that the Lib Dems suffer from one of these afflictions. Answers on a postcard.

Sorry for not blogging more, I’ve come down with a heavy cold over the last couple of days and haven’t felt like doing much.

I will blog on it more at a later point but a planning application for light industrial units and warehouses on the Carthouse Lane site, as well as 80 new allotments, has been put in by Rutland Homes. We are assured that these will be in addition to and not instead of the current Horsell Allotments.

I need to declare a personal interest here – as someone on the waiting list for Horsell Allotments, I stand to gain getting an allotment several years earlier than expected if the application is granted and the scheme goes ahead. But setting that aside, I don’t have a problem with the warehouses given what’s already there – and think it would be difficult to stop them through the planning system anyway.

However, I’d be interested to hear from anyone living in the lane if they have any objections. The application can be viewed on the Woking Borough Council website at the Public Access for Planning application. Under application search, enter PLAN/2009/1091. Objections need to be in by January 21 – Horsell Residents Association is aware.

Surrey County Council announced today that it was no longer pursuing Energy from Waste Plants, known to you and I as incinerators, in Surrey. Thus ends one of the most expensive and fiercely fought policy battles in the area’s history.

There will be no incinerators in Surrey - including Martyr's Lane

The county council has obviously come to the conclusion that residents in all affected areas would fight any proposals to the wire and they couldn’t justify the cost in terms of money and time in battling their own residents. It’s a message that should have got through a while ago – when you find yourself being taken to court by the people who fund your wages and pensions, something is not quite right.

There is an hint of new brush as well, with Cllr Andrew Povey making what I hope will be the first of many sensible and pragmatic decisions in his new regime and change of direction with what came before. Instead of the waste plants, there will be an Eco Park that will cost a quarter of the £200m Surrey wanted to spend on its incinerators and a gasifier and anaerobic digester will be among the “attractions”.

So that means that Martyr’s Lane will not be the site of an EfW plant, which is a relief following the recent good news about Heather Farm. Whether or not it’s the future of waste management, the authorities failed to convince residents of its need and there is no reason why a government should do anything to make its people sleep less easy at night.

And I’m delighted to see some common sense finally emanating from county hall.

One final thing though – the Surrey Joint Waste Management Strategy for 2006-2025 still says:

“Whilst acknowledging the concerns of some people, but with due regard to the waste hierarchy, we consider energy-from-waste recovery via incineration (with the most up to date controls on and effective monitoring of emissions by the Environment Agency as the most practicable (sic), financially viable and sustainable approach currently available for that residual part…[that cannot be dealt with any other way]“

Will this strategy now be changed? And won’t that require all 12 Surrey councils’ consent?

Woking’s Conservative group delivered an early Christmas present to residents on Thursday evening when it put forward a motion to freeze the charges the council levies on residents for green waste collection until 2011.

At the meeting of full council, the group decided that to encourage people to use the green bin collection scheme, it would suspend any price increase during the first year of operation. The council is also planning to introduce weekly food waste collection at the beginning of 2010.

Leader of the Executive John Kingsbury said: “Having considered this issue very carefully and having weighed up the challenges we face in balancing the budget, we felt that increasing the charges for green waste collection in the first year of operation would be wrong.

“The Conservative group is very aware of the lasting effects of the recession on hard-working people in Woking and even if the signs of recovery begin to show it will take a long time to shake off the terrible problems this government has led us into.

“We have already committed to keeping council tax as low as possible for Woking residents and we similarly felt that 2010 was too early to be asking people to pay more for the green bin subscription service.”

I haven't got a picture of a Woking bin, this one's from Peterborough

I saw Denzil Coulson after the executive in Brewery Road Car Park while I was chatting with the News and Mail’s excellent reporter Beth Woodger. He stopped to make some chat and it was good to exchange words after a few little storms in teacups over blog posts etc. He’s standing as the Lib Dem candidate in North East Hampshire, where he’ll be canvassing the leafy streets of Fleet trying to nab James Arbuthnot’s 12,500 majority away.

You’d have to be pretty optimistic to believe he’ll do it but it takes guts to slog away at the other side’s safe seats and it’s fighters like Denzil who keep politics interesting. While I wouldn’t like to think we’ll lose a seat like North East Hants, I’m sure Denzil will give a good account of himself and I’m pleased he’s standing for Goldsworth West again – we might not agree on much but he’s strong member and the council needs that on all sides.

Following our discussion, he walked off and looking at his website for the first time since the Queen’s Speech, I now realise why. He’s gone and posted a cheeky little piece about the rise in cost of the green bins for April 2010, claiming that it is about raising money rather than keeping the environment clean. Well, it’s only going up £2  for most people from £35 to £37, which isn’t exactly extortionate and from £15 to £20 for a second bin.

Denzil’s point is that concessionary charges are going up from £20 to £25 for the first bin and £10 to £15 for the second, which works out at a higher percentage than non-concessions. But obviously if you calculate it in percentage terms, you will get a higher percentage the lower the starting base – that’s just the way numbers work.

I don’t think it’s a big secret that the point of the new scheme is both environmental ie it will help more carbon-efficient collection and prevent 400,000 plastic bags going to landfill and budgetary ie it embraces the principle that residents who use the service should contribute to it rather than the cost being spread to everyone through council tax.

One of the beauties of the new waste scheme is that it introduces a small slice of free market economics into the service. It’s basic pricing theory – if the council charges too much for bins, people simply won’t take up the service and the council will be forced to reduce the price. If however take-up is huge and the council doesn’t test price elasticity at a higher level, it has done taxpayers – including those on lower incomes - a disservice by not attaining Best Value.

So if concessionary households are struggling to find the extra £5 a year, that is something that the market will tell us and I am sure will be examined further.

Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

I’ve never quite understood why a possible site for one of Surrey’s two required energy-from-waste plants was smack bang in the middle of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Horsell Common is a precious resource – a haven for wildlife and rare plants, a respite from the bustling town life all around, a place for walking dogs and riding horses and somewhere of cultural importance to Woking being identified so clearly in HG Wells’s War of The Worlds. It stretches much farther than the width of Shores Road and cuts across the majority of the west and east Horsell areas. It is generally undervalued within Woking but has a number of staunch supporters who are dedicated to protecting it and its natural beauty and preserving it for others to enjoy.

What it is not is the correct place to site a large industrial building for generating power. It is not a place where large vehicles can enter and exit easily and it should be protected from the noise, odours and detritus of medium-scale industrial activity. To me, this is plainly obvious; but two sets of local authority officers have worked in such a way as to make exactly such an industrial eyesore a realistic possibility. Thankfully, it now looks unlikely.

Horsell Common Preservation Society has successfully argued to overturn a Woking Borough Council planning decision against a change of use for the site to include small-scale industrial and storage buildings. The borough council refused the application on the basis that the Surrey Waste Plan had set aside the site as a possible location for one of its two energy-from-waste plants. But the inspector decided there were compelling reasons – not least of them concerning HCPS’s control over access to the site – that meant Heather Farm was unlikely to be viable prospect as a EFW location and he granted the original application.

His report is pretty clear and it won’t make for comforting reading at county hall. But it should do in Horsell; if a buyer can be found to take on the operation of the site, we should have seen off the bizarre prospect of a waste plant on the doorstep of one of the county’s most environmentally sensitive areas.

Leader of Woking Borough Council’s Conservative executive Cllr John Kingsbury said he was very pleased with the success of the new green waste collection scheme as more than 6,000 households had opted to receive the new bins.

The scheme, which started at the beginning of November, attracts around 20 new subscribers every day who receive a green garden waste bin to replace the current plastic sack scheme ending in December. This bin can then be filled with garden waste and is collected once every two weeks along with either household waste or recycling, depending where the subscriber lives.

Cllr Kingsbury, whose Conservative executive championed the scheme said: “It’s clear to me that Woking residents are seeing the benefits of the new green bin. These bins prevent a huge amount of plastic bags going to landfill and allow the council to plan collection routes more efficiently.

“More than 6,000 households signing up to the scheme also means that we have received substantial revenue to help pay for the service. This system will help us keep council tax as low as possible and is fairer for those people who either don’t have gardens or who already pay a service charge for their grounds maintenance.

 ”I am delighted with the scheme’s success thus far and hope that many more residents buy into our new arrangements which are environmentally friendly.”

I received my green bins a couple of days ago for the new garden waste collection. As I was among the first to sign up for the scheme and so got two bins for £45, which I thought was very satisfactory. Over the weekend, I have cleared my vegetable beds of weeds and grass as well put in grass and cuttings – I’ve still got room in one bin for more and the other is empty.

This really is a great scheme. It will save 400,000 plastic bags each year going to landfill. It will mean that collections will become more efficient, only going to those who have signed up, saving money for the taxpayer and carbon dioxide for the environment. The bins will prevent animal interference and the whole scheme will raise revenue for the council to offset its cost.

It is only right that those who use the service because should pay for it, rather than the cost be spread evenly through council tax onto those who perhaps don’t have gardens – or, worse, those who live in communal blocks where they already pay service charges to have them tended.

Change is always a difficult thing. People are used to the old system – it’s easy and straighforward with no capital outlay needed. But with budget constraints on us, residents will have to get used to the idea that more and more council services may require a contribution from users. It’s not a happy thing to face up to but it may be the only option for a sustainable financial future.

The Liberal Democrats of course claim that they would run the council along a different financial model where there would be enough money for everyone to have all the services they want – and to take on some of the county council’s too apparently – but having looked at their record in Kingston, Waverley and Richmond, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

The only way to restore proper funding to Surrey as a whole is to vote for a government that will scrap the Barnet formula and restore parity of funding across the UK.

Given the mess that Labour has made of the economy, that might not entail much more money in Woking but at least we won’t be losing out.

Is it me or is Gordon Brown’s spiel about the environment particularly uninspiring? All the stuff about “no plan B“, warning us of “catastrophe” and calling on the world to achieve a “momentous” agreement?

We’ve been hearing this kind of rhetoric for years – first from Tony Blair and then from the PM. To be fair, John Major’s government did practically nothing to bring the green agenda to the fore and Labour has pushed European legislation to force recycling and better environmental standards. I’m heartened that DC sees this as a plank of his manifesto.

But really, is tired cliches all the PM can manage on this subject? Where are the ideas, the suggestions, the commitments? If he can’t get excited – or exciting – on this subject, what hope is there for him?

Or perhaps he realises that without the rapidly-developing nations on board, the Copenhagen gathering is little more than a fortnight of lame talk.

If my blogging gets a little thin over the next couple of days, I apologise – there are a few things at work that need sorting out and as you can imagine in this climate, it’s not all as good as it could be.

Anyway, I thought the DC’s keynote speech on harnessing the power of profit and the conscience of the consumer to create a ”green consumerism” was the first significant environmental contribution from his since the “Vote Blue, Go Green” strapline was quietly dropped a few years ago. Undoubtedly, DC knows that his environmental credentials might just be enough to swing some ex-Conservative Lib Dem voters who can put up with no electoral reform if the Conservatives can show a genuine desire to help the less well-off and a commitment to environmental action.

But it  has to be credible. And I think this is – there’s no point setting out a vision for an economy run along green lines. The economy will always win over environmental considerations if allowed to go unchecked. What you need to do is use economic imperatives such as profit and efficiency to drive the environmental agenda forward. I don’t think the Liberal Democrats have demonstrated that they understand that in practical sense – for them, business behaviour must be re-built around environmental concerns.

DC knows that business behaviour revolves around money and believes that he can channel that motivation for the benefit of all of us. I hope he’s prepared to take it forward with gusto and resist the inevitable pressure that will come from the most unsustainable parts of the economy. They are also some of the largest and loudest parts – but he needs to make them understand that size and volume will not redress the planet’s problems. It is often those without a voice who are pointing to the moral path.

Update: A quick peak at Tim Dodds’s blog has revealed this article by the BBC News Climate Correspondent. I subscribe to environmental action because of the problems of a growing population and the potential for conflict as well as the unpleasant effects of unfettered industrial expansion and ecological decline. But it makes you think…