The Royal Borough has issued a statement to Letsrecycle.com today saying it considers the Audit Commission's waste management inspection to have “over-emphasised the significance of having a clear written commitment to meet the Government’s 'statutory' recycling target.”
The Audit Commission's report said Kensington and Chelsea's performance of 7.59%, down from 8.67% in 2001/2, was poor compared with other London boroughs. The report also said the area “remains a long way off the borough's statutory target for 2003/2004.”
The Royal Borough responded by saying that “Although the council is committed to improving its recycling performance, and can show how local funds have been spent to achieve this, the service provided is also driven by local residents expectations of clean streets and high standards of waste collection.
Unreasonable
“The report highlighted the council's street cleaning and waste collection services as 'good', but the overall judgment of the waste management service was only rated as 'fa;ir'. The council considers the statutory recycling target to be unrealistic and consider it unreasonable that the overall service has been downgraded as a consequence.”
Giving a wider local authority view on the issue, the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC) said that achieving statutory targets relied on funding, which was not guaranteed and could only be secured through a successful bid.
“We wouldn't say that the targets are unrealistic, but, they are difficult to achieve. This is partly to do with bidding and funding. If you receive money from Defra's 140m waste minimisation and recycling challenge you are more likely to suceed,” said Lee Marshall, press officer at LARAC.
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