Blighted by bins: Canning Road in Addiscombe is supposed to be an attractive conservation area

KEN LEE on how some residents are responding to the imposition of wheelie bins they never wanted, and mostly never need

More than three months after the council spent £2.3million to deliver new wheelie bins to 150,000 properties around the borough, and the Council Tax-payers who paid for the often unwanted imposition on their properties are still seething over the way their homes and streets have been needlessly blighted.

Some residents were told by Croydon Council, belatedly, that, after careful reconsideration, they would remove the unwanted bins.

Bin and gone: Veolia often leave wheelie bins strewn across pavements and driveways after rubbish collections

Old recycling boxes, which the council first said would need to be taken to its recycling centres, would also be taken away by Croydon’s rubbish contractors, Veolia.

Others were told that instead of recycling boxes, they would be equipped with bags for their cans, bottles and paper waste.

Yet despite these council stated U-turns, many residents report that the unwanted wheelies remain, the recycling boxes have not been taken, and there’s been no sign of the promised bags for recycling.

“This is the mess we have been left with by Croydon Council in a conservation area,” one loyal reader living in Addiscombe told Inside Croydon today. It is this residents’ photograph, from Canning Road, which is at the top of this report.

Bins and discarded recycling boxes are strewn across the front areas of private properties and the pavements.

“I have written and complained,”  the resident says, “and Veolia get the blame for not taking them away. London Borough of Croydon say they have taken them away, which we all know they haven’t.

Bins, as far as the eye can see: the eyesore wheelies and discarded recycling boxes do little to enhance ‘kerb appeal’

“Have a look at the Addiscombe conservation area, specifically Clyde Road, it’s just a bin collection  – they are everywhere, on the pavement, near the pavement, and they look awful.

“But what do the council care?”

They are sentiments shared by many residents across the borough, who complain that the council’s bins policy has now blighted their homes while providing no perceptible improvement in service.

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