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Refuse Collection

No, we did not. We looked at the way in which decisions by the waste disposal authorities reduce the options available to waste collection authorities, and I shall give one example. There is a great debate about whether the amount of recyclables that people put out are maximised by making it simple and asking them to put out all their recyclables in one bag, which the council subsequently sorts, or whether householders should be required to do some of the pre-sorting. Making it simple so that the amount of recycling is maximised means that the recyclable products are more mixed up, so the quality of the end product, which is then recycled or sold to someone who recycles it, is poorer. Those options are closed down, depending on the infrastructure in which the waste disposal authority has invested for dealing with recyclables. Some waste collection authorities have fewer choices available to them than others because of waste collection costs. The Committee thought that there should be a lot more co-operation between councils to obtain economies of scale, and we endorsed the proposal to allow joint waste authorities because there is a lot of merit in that, although, again, it should be left to local authorities to decide whether they wish to do that. We are pleased that that option is available for them. I want to touch on unofficial charging. At the moment, waste collection authorities are not legally allowed to charge for refuse collection, which is why the Government are proposing the pilot schemes, although they can charge for collection of bulky items. They can refuse to collect waste that has been left outside the containers provided, or to introduce an additional charge. In fact, some local authorities have tried to limit the amount of refuse that householders can throw away by restricting the amount that can be put out each week, or by introducing charges for additional waste. I believe that Broxbourne in Hertfordshire is piloting a scheme under which it issues households with one purple refuse sack a week, and then charges, but only 28p, for each additional sack if required by the householder. North Dorset, more realistically, charges £1 for additional sacks. The Committee thought that that was a good idea, but was slightly doubtful about whether it was legal. DEFRA apparently wrote in the autumn to all local authorities reminding them of the current legal position, but it is obviously still a grey area if Broxbourne feels safe about going ahead and charging for a service that it could be argued it should provide out of the council tax. That is an interesting way in which councils are, effectively, already using charges as a mechanism to try to encourage householders to produce less waste. The Broxbourne scheme is reducing waste by charging on volume, and there is the alternative of doing that by weight. The simplest way is through wheelie bins with a chip in them, which weighs the waste when it is tipped into the refuse lorry. Many councils have already introduced that so that they know how much waste is in the van and how much they are taking to landfill. The technology is not new; it would be used for a different purpose. I want to draw attention to a couple of other points that came up during our inquiry and which relate to what might be deemed to be slightly perverse incentives that have arisen from the systems that have been put in place to encourage more recycling, particularly more diversion from landfill of biodegradable waste. First, it was pointed out to us that councils that encourage households to compost garden and kitchen waste on their own properties are removing green waste from the waste stream that the council picks up to be recycled or put into landfill. That means that the council's ability to reduce the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill has been reduced, because the waste is out of the system. That creates a perverse situation, in which councils that have encouraged home compositing make it more difficult for themselves to reduce the proportion of biodegradable waste that they divert from landfill. A side argument was made by some urban authorities. They said that where people have big gardens it was easy for authorities to reduce the proportion of biodegradable waste that goes to landfill because most of the biodegradable stuff is garden waste. Such waste is easy to handle, because it can be collected in a separate bin and taken away, which leads to a big reduction in the biodegradable waste that goes to landfill. In urban areas, however, nobody has big gardens, so they do not produce garden waste; all the biodegradable waste is food waste, which is much more difficult to divert. I merely repeat the arguments.