Last night Labour councillors voted in favour to change the way our household waste is collected across Chorley's Borough Council area.
Labour's plan involves two main changes. From April this year householders will now use a brown bin for mingled card and paper with the "option" for every household who wants garden waste collection to pay £30 for a new grey bin and £30 every year to have this emptied.
This proposal was not supported by our Conservative Group.
Instead our viable alternative proposal was defeated by the majority Labour group.
Our Conservative plan was instead to:-
- only charge £30 for replacement or lost bins
- No charge for garden waste collection and frequency to be 2 weekly during summer months and 4 weekly during the winter months - using existing brown bins.
- Co-mingled paper and card with a reduced frequency of 4 weekly collection - and using existing green plastic box.
- Reduce frequency of collection for blue bin (cans, glass and plastic recycling) to 4 weekly.
Cllr Martin Boardman (representing Chorley's Eccleston and Mawdesley Ward in the South Ribble Constituency) explained in a Facebook web post "What our Conservative proposal planned to do was to avoid the huge amount of confusion, and not requiring over £500k of spend on 20,000 new grey bins in addition to extra administration and distribution costs."
"The Conservative plan did not require every household with a garden who "chooses" to opt in to this scheme to find a home for another bin - that is now 4 bins minimum. And it does not require an "optional", stealth tax to be waged at anyone who lives outside the town centre, on small housing estates all over the Chorley Borough and all rural area."
"Labour have known for over 5 years that reductions in government revenue were coming and have done nothing by way of savings or contingencies to soften the impact when these savings need to be made."