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BINMAGEDDON!: It’s not costing £2.3m. It’s costing £2.3m

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Recycling boxes, made from recycled plastic, now discarded as surplus to requirements

KEN LEE, our Town Hall reporter, on the latest feeble effort by Croydon Council to try to justify its rubbish service and the impact of #CroydonBinChaos

It’s official. The new bins being imposed on households across the borough, from Coulsdon to Upper Norwood, are not costing Council Tax-payers £2.3million.

Oh no. According to the council’s deputy leader, the new bins are costing… £2.3million.

Stuart Collins is the council’s cabinet member responsible for doing the bidding of Veolia, with the haphazard roll-out of the wheelie bins, introduced mainly to make the council contractors’ job easier and to cut-down on their sloppy work on bin days, when our streets are all-too-often strewn with rubbish as they drop the contents of the old-style recycling boxes.

Last month, Inside Croydon revealed that, according to senior council executive Tom Lawrence, the new, smaller wheelies for recycling are costing Croydon Council £2.3million – or nearly half the supposed savings provided by the troublesome new system.

Lawrence is the “head of environment and leisure”, in charge of implementing the switch of recycling from boxes to the unwanted wheelie bins, so he really ought to know.

Stuart Collins: he done his sums, and they still add up to the unwanted wheelies costing Council Tax-payers £2.3m

But now, Inside Croydon’s loyal reader has been in touch to say that, according to one of the Town Hall’s most senior councillors, that £2.3million is all wrong.

They have passed on to us an emailed response they received from Collins, after they asked about this £2.3million being spent on the unwanted and often unnecessary new bins.

This is what Collins wrote. Unedited. Lewis Carroll would have been so proud…

The new system is not costing tax payers anything, it costs £2.3m pounds to purchase the new bins from our capital budget, the saving already agreed with the South London Waste Partnership and is in our annual revenue budget is £5m per year.

So a saving of £2.7m in the first year and after that £5m per year that will be spent on vital services.

Clear?

So it’s “not costing tax-payers anything”, but the £5million annual saving is being reduced by £2.3million.

So that’s alright then…


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