Catch-22 problem not wasted on council
That is because, as people separate their food waste into the special biodegradable bags and caddies, they realise just how much they are wasting – so next time they go to the supermarket they buy less.
The rise in food prices over the past couple of years may also have had an impact.
It seems that paying for several hundred thousand food waste bins, extra staff, trucks and processing facilities to collect them is an expensive way of showing people how much they waste and getting them to change. Particularly at a time of cuts. It is not surprising this has been ruled out.
So now the problem facing the council is finding other ways to show people how to reduce or reuse their leftovers and stop overstocking the fridge.
All the strategy so far revealed on this is some vague idea about changes in bio-gas technology and some community-based solutions.
We wait with bated breath.
GIVEN Birmingham's reputation for vote fraud – it was famously likened to a banana republic by an Election Court judge a few years back – it would seem an ideal place to trial any moves towards formal voter identification.
More recently foreign observers have highlighted concerns about the sanctity of the vote in Ladywood in the 2015 and 2017 general elections.
So far Woking, Gosport, Bromley, Watford and Slough have come forward for the trial.
Tower Hamlets, which like Birmingham has a reputation for electoral misconduct, will also take part.
You can vote if you turn up to the polling station and give the clerk your name and address, verbally.
You don't even need to remember the polling card the council helpfully delivers in the run up to the election.
This has of course given rise to allegations of fraud – in the form of people voting multiple times under different names.
In Northern Ireland the practice was once widespread where abuse of the system was driven by the sectarian politics.
The the motto was said to be “vote early and vote often”, so voters were then required to show a photo ID when exercising their democratic right.
The system is now set to be trialled in the UK, but Birmingham did not volunteer itself.
There is tension between making it easy for people to vote to increase turnout and ensuring the ballot is secure and free from interference – otherwise we may as well have voting by text message.
The freeing up of postal votes to all in the early 2000s was one such move, but this opened the door to the industrial scale postal vote fraud of 2004.
On the other hand, adding restrictions generally cuts off voters on the margins – and voter ID might rule out those whose lifestyles don't require them to own a driving licence or passport – or those who easily mislay them.
The tighter the rules the more people who may miss out.
The trials are aimed at studying all the effects.
However, given Birmingham's previous history a trial of voter ID would have shown willingness to tackle the problem and shake the city's tarnished reputation.