Checkpoint Charlie and a carpet of officialdom on a trip to the tip

SHOW ME a Town Hall and I’ll show you a bottleneck. It is just a fact of life that actions which the private sector can execute in an instant take most councils several months, a sheaf of forms and a consultation to accomplish. The longer the process, the more they seem to relish it.

This was brought home to me on Monday when I treated Mrs B to a new microwave oven. Who said the age of romance was dead?

Performing my public duty to recycle the old one, I hauled it into the boot and drove all of 300 yards to the nearest recycling centre. I could have carried it, but the health and safety regulations there dictate that it’s safer for people to arrive in vehicles.

“Have you got an appointment?” said a Charlie in a high visibility jacket, brandishing his clipboard with the self- important flourish of someone checking passengers on to the QE2.

An appointment? To see the binmen? Who do they think they are? The NHS?

I didn’t realise it would be necessary, I said, surveying the almost empty site. But I had failed to take account of the carpet of officialdom in which our postpandemic public services have been covered. For not only could I not get in without an advance booking, I wasn’t even allowed to make one. I lived – I was told – on the wrong side of town.

The border between the Leeds and Bradford districts is just a few doors from my house. The tip is on one side; the Behrens estate on the other. Until recently it made no difference but when the quarantine descended, so did an invisible Berlin Wall between us. If I wanted to recycle anything, I was told, I would have to drive to a tip on my side of the wall. The nearest was 20 minutes away. So much for reducing my carbon footprint.

I retreated from Checkpoint Charlie and dumped the microwave in the landfill bin instead. A less responsible person might just have fly- tipped it over a hedge.

This is a problem that has less to do with health and safety than with box ticking. It took years of lobbying by local MPs before common sense prevailed and residents on either side of the border were allowed to use the facility closest to them. But though it had taken longer to negotiate than Brexit, the entente cordiale was ripped up in the wake of the quarantine.

It’s not clear why council dumps should be worse affected by the pandemic than everyone else, but their use appears to have reopened the schism between the two councils. The authority in Leeds said it was hard to maintain social distancing at the tip in question, so it distanced everyone from Bradford back to their own side of the wall. Based on what I saw, they weren’t getting much trade from their own side, either.

It’s a minor local issue. But it’s symptomatic of a much bigger one.

Putting up barriers rather than tearing them down is an approach to problem solving that Town Halls have made their own. It runs counter to the innovation and positivity that defines the best of the private sector. In this case it works against the very environmental agenda that recycling sectors are there to promote.

It makes me wonder whether those Extinction Rebellion protesters who have been obstructing the highways this week haven’t got a point. Officials will never change their ways unless someone puts a rocket up them.

I asked the two councils how they could justify sending people miles out of their way to recycle anything. Bradford at first said I would have to talk to Leeds. But then my intervention bore fruit, and Leeds said it had decided in future to accept bookings from both sides of the wall. It explained neither the initial ban nor the U- turn.

It will find Extinction Rebellion a harder bunch to deal with. They have set their sights on a much bigger problem facing Leeds and Bradford councils: the extension of the airport that bears both their names. The proposed £ 150m terminal there would greatly accelerate climate change, the protesters argue.

The councils will have to mount a counter- argument to this but they will struggle to defend their environmental record when, at grassroots level, they’ve been forcing public- minded people to behave in an ecologically unsound manner, just to satisfy some capricious regulations. Now more than ever, it is bridges that our Town Hall officials should be building; not walls.

Putting up barriers is an approach to problem solving that Town Halls have made their own.