Council’s £1k bill... for bins rota

A WASTE and recycling campaigner was left stunned after a Scots local authority told him it would cost almost £1,000 to provide details of its bin collections.

Matt Kane had asked for the data from Dundee City Council through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

But officials claimed that it would take 38 hours – a full week’s work – to collate the information, and he would have to fork out £945 to cover the cost.

Mr Kane, who is producing a national waste and recycling database, has contacted every local authority in the UK to ask for the dates of collections.

The 38-year-old computer programmer, from Wiltshire, found Dundee City Council to be ‘one of the most unhelpful’.

‘I laughed out loud when I read that it would take them a full week’s work,’ he said.

‘They were the first council to try to charge me for the information. I was totally stunned. I’m a coder and I know how long this stuff takes. Even if you are working at your most leisurely pace, it’s not something that would take more than ten minutes. When a council is so opaque about something so simple, it makes you think they have something to hide.’

It comes after a report revealed problems with bin collections in the city, with no rubbish picked up from around 1,800 homes.

North East Tory MSP Bill Bowman has called on the Scottish Government to step in to ‘clear up the mess’.

A spokesman for the Dundee City Council said the authority would not comment on individual FOI cases.