Green waste plan ‘does not warrant expense’

Collections will not reduce garden refuse and will increase traffic and carbon emissions, say councils

COUNCILS are resisting plans by the Government to introduce a universal green waste collection.

The Local Government Association (LGA) has called on the Government not to implement free garden waste collections for every home, which ministers believe would save families more than £100 million a year.

The LGA has warned that such a move, which the Government wants to roll out in England in 2023-24, would cost taxpayers £564 million a year as well as an initial £176m to implement.

It said introducing “blanket-free garden waste collections is unnecessary” because many taxpayers “do not have a garden or require a green waste collection service”.

The plans were developed as part of the Department for Environment’s consultation paper on household and business recycling in England earlier this year. The Government stated that the “collection of garden waste for recycling or composting has several benefits, including job creation and diverting the material from residual waste streams, where it can end up in landfill and release harmful greenhouse gases”. It added introducing “a minimum free garden waste service” would increase England’s household recycling rate by approximately five per cent.

However, the LGA has spoken out against the plans ahead of next week’s spending review as it believes the Government should fund it in full.

The LGA found that on a sample size of 11 bin collection cycles across eight councils in England, serving on average 10,895 properties per HGV collection, the initiative would require 600 extra HGV drivers. This is at a time when there is a shortage of drivers and it would increase carbon emissions.

The LGA also claimed the plan would not cut waste because garden rubbish is only a small proportion of landfill.

As part of the Government’s plans to reduce its carbon emissions it pledged £295 million earlier this week, to introduce free separate food waste collections for every household by 2025.

David Renard, LGA environment spokesman, said: “We want to work with the Government to reduce green waste being sent to landfill. But introducing blanket free garden waste collections is unnecessary. The proposals risk increasing traffic, and pumping out more carbon emissions and making air pollution worse.”

Dan Humphreys, District Councils Network lead member for enhancing quality of life, backed the LGA’S stance. “Councils have been working hard to continue a regular waste collection service despite the challenges brought by the pandemic,” he said.

“Due to the shortage of drivers, many councils will struggle to introduce an unnecessary and costly free garden waste collection service as well.”

Mr Humphreys said green waste was “not a significant issue” and did not “warrant the expense or the increased emissions from an expanded fleet”.

Asevere squeeze on household budgets in the coming months appears to be all but certain. The Bank of England is warning that inflation may reach 5 per cent and the cost of energy has already risen sharply. The Government is increasing taxes on workers, while for many people the growth in their income will not exceed surging consumer prices.

Sceptics of the Government’s plans for a net zero future fear that this may be just the start. Decarbonising the economy is a fine ambition, but the danger of setting demanding targets for introducing electric cars or heat pumps is that the public will be obliged to spend considerable amounts of money on new technologies that do not currently compete, like-forlike, with their fossil fuel alternatives. The Government is putting a great deal of faith in the ability of private sector innovators to deliver rapid improvements, and bring costs down. It is also putting a great deal of money into green investment that is not destined to pay off.

It is possible that once the Cop26 Climate Change summit, to be held in Glasgow later this month, is over we will hear little more of some of the wilder proposals the Government announced earlier this week. Ministers are evidently keen to burnish their climate credentials ahead of the summit, which appears less and less likely to result in the hoped-for global agreement on reducing carbon emissions. It is unclear whether the leaders of some of the world’s biggest emitters will even attend.

However, the great risk remains that, for all the talk of distinctively Conservative environmental policies, the green agenda becomes a mechanism for introducing socialist command-and-control policies that seek to curtail individual freedoms and load the economy with even more debt, when other countries are doing less, if anything.

This is not inevitable. Great advances have already been made in electric vehicles, for example, by companies such as Tesla. However, innovation does not happen by magic. Companies and entrepreneurs take risks and develop new products, to the benefit of everyone, when the conditions are conducive for them to do so. This means lower taxes and more relaxed regulations, not the highest tax burden for 70 years.

Next week, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, will deliver his Budget. He remains constrained by the country’s perilous fiscal situation, and talk of a return to Covid restrictions this winter will not have helped economic confidence. However, he still has an opportunity to prove that the Government has not broken entirely with free market, Thatcherite orthodoxy. He should take it. is sensitive to charges of unreliability. It also marks a shift in policy from only a few years ago, when the UK was accused of being too willing to abandon its principles and jeopardise its national security to reap the economic rewards of partnership deals in areas such as nuclear power.

It is a welcome shift none the less. Beijing has few qualms about using economic links as a tool through which to quash criticism of its policies. There will obviously be issues on which the UK will need to work with China, including climate change and the prevention of future pandemics. There have been benefits, as well as downsides, to Beijing joining the global market. However, the first step towards a more realistic policy towards the regime is a recognition that it is not a partner that shares our values, but very often stands in opposition to them.