WHAT ROT!

As bullying councils threaten us with £2,500 fines and criminal records for putting too much in our bins, a withering rebuke from this former dustman . . .

SOMEWHERE in the offices of Stoke- on-Trent’s city council, some desk-bound martinet is no doubt feeling intensely satisfied with him or herself.

The bureaucrat’s opiate of power! Residents in part of the city have been sent ludicrously bossy letters ticking them off about their rubbish bins.

These bullying missives — complete with grammatical mistakes, wreathed in ostentatious legalese and signed ‘Investigation Officer’ — have threatened householders with fines of up to £2,500 and a criminal record if they put their bins out at the wrong time. Residents will also be in trouble if any rubbish spills. The possible fines for local businesses is almost ten times higher — a staggering £20,000.

Put out your bins a minute before 7pm in Stoke on the day before collection, or fail to bring them back inside by 7pm on collection day, and you will be treated like a member of the criminal underworld.

You may be hauled to court with all the full force of Her Britannic Majesty’s Law and whacked with a criminal conviction, along with a fine that is well over a month’s income for many Stoke residents. As for any small- scale employer hit with a £20,000 fine, it could mean instant bankruptcy.

Minefield

Thank goodness capital punishment has been abolished or there is no knowing what they would be doing next. In 1931, U.S. gangster Al Capone was finally nabbed by the authorities on the comparatively minor offence of tax avoidance. Today, big Al would be done for putting the wrong sort of plastic in his recycling trays.

What is it about bins? They bring out the worst in bureaucrats and politicians. Rubbish collection should be a basic duty of councils, a necessity to prevent a stench in the streets and infestations of vermin.

It should be pretty simple: send out a dustcart to people’s houses once a week to take their waste to the municipal dump. Even in our climate, rubbish will pong something rotten after a week. That, in turn, can bring disease.

In recent years, as ecofriendly recycling has become a much-boasted issue and our island ever more crowded, bins have become a minefield of nitpicking do’s and don’ts.

Finger-wagging functionaries are often more interested in flexing their muscles than in clearing rubbish off our streets. Meanwhile, supermarkets cover produce — even bananas — in ever more packaging. When the retail sector is so profligate with cardboard and plastic containers, is it any wonder our bins are so full?

Rules vary from area to area. Some councils demand various types of recycling (containers for paper, metal, organic waste etc.). It never seems to occur to council bosses that some residents might find this confusing and stressful. An elderly friend of mine who had suffered a stroke used to become anxious every fortnight, worrying he had not put his recycling in the right containers.

Other areas, like my local council in Herefordshire, are more lenient. We place all our recycling in one big, green wheelie bin. They collect it once a fortnight, alternating with the black bin of landfill rubbish. As elsewhere in the country, this change to bi-weekly collections has coincided with a rise in fly-tipping.

Suspicious

Some councils have become unsettlingly suspicious of their residents. On Saturday, the Mail reported that some bin lorries are now equipped with as many as seven spy cameras, with dustmen being ordered to rifle through rubbish to spot ‘recycling offenders’ (i.e. criminal masterminds, or maybe just confused innocents, who have put an empty baked bean tin in the wrong bin).

Seven cameras! Is that a dustcart or a lens-bristling mobile surveillance unit from GCHQ? And how much does all this CCTV cost?

These are not just occasional lunacies. The Mail found that 166 councils are in on the spy-camera lark and seven million ‘ incidents’ ( relish the melodrama of that word) were recorded last year, a morethan-threefold increase on the previous year. Can we not imagine the joy with which an ‘investigation officer’ treats the discovery of illicit potato peelings in a bin-liner destined for the council dump?

‘Those peelings should be in your organic waste container! You have committed an offence and are hereby given a formal written warning pursuant to the Anti- social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014!’

When in Opposition, David Cameron promised to ensure our bins were emptied once a week (as they had been for a century or so before that ended during the Blair/Brown years).

Those Tory promises were repeatedly broken and few of us are now lucky enough to have weekly collections. Worse, council refuse- collection departments started to become grimly jobsworthian. If rubbish was poking out of the top of a bin by even half an inch, binmen might decline to empty it — and instead take a photographic record of the ‘offence’ on their lorry’s CCTV.

Some people blame overzealous collectors, but having myself once been a binman (in Oxfordshire, for a few weeks during my gap year in 1981), I doubt that. From my brief time on the dustcarts, I recall that binmen were good-natured blokes who went out of their way to help housewives and the elderly.

That was back in the days of metal bins, when ash from domestic fire grates made them heavy and dirty (at the end of a morning’s shift, we would be covered in ash). Yet my colleagues would cheerfully go round to the back of an old lady’s house to collect her bin if it had been too heavy for her to bring to the pavement.

My days as a dustman may have been 35 years ago, but I doubt attitudes have changed much on the lorries. The current unhelpfulness, I strongly suspect, is coming from control-obsessed bureaucrats at the depot or in the council HQs. If anyone deserves an anti-social order, it is they.

Stoke council’s grotesquely disproportionate threats, exposed yesterday by the Mail, have been issued under a littleknown instrument called a Community Protection Notice (CPN). These CPNs were introduced in 2014 to help the police stop anti-social behaviour.

In 2013, when the Lords was debating whether to approve CPNs, a Government minister promised they would not be abused by councils. ‘A CPN should not be issued lightly,’ said Lord Taylor of Holbeach, then parliamentary undersecretary at Theresa May’s Home Office. They would be used to deal only with ‘persistent’ or ‘unreasonable’ yobbishness or anti-social behaviour.

Lord Taylor gave three examples of the type of misconduct he envisaged being addressed by CPNs: a pet- owner who habitually allowed a dog to pollute communal gardens with its mess; a group of drunks regularly making noise and waking their neighbours; a takeaway restaurant whose customers persistently dropped litter and made noise late at night.

Criminal

The case in Stoke does not seem to be anything near such a level of severity.

What is, say, a Stoke octogenarian to do on an icy winter’s evening if she wants to put out her bin before 7pm? She may not want to risk going out in the dark. Equally, she may not wish to step outside first thing in the morning while it is frosty, in case she falls on her steps.

What about a young person on zero hours who has been given a longer-than-normal shift and will not be home to retrieve the bin before 7pm on collection day? Or a householder whose bin is knocked over by an urban fox? Will the householder be held criminally responsible for the spillage?

Or what about someone like Ivan Amison, 69, who is in trouble with Stoke authorities after a plastic bag was found in the wrong part of his household waste? Mr Amison says it was put there by a passer-by.

In a sane world, rubbish collectors would shrug, take out the bag and get on with their job. But in 21st-century Stoke, Mr Amison is treated like a pariah and threatened with a criminal record.

Rubbish? You can certainly say that again.