Gloucester city council has gone on the offensive in a war of words with local and national newspapers over the revenue accrued from its subscription-based green waste service.
The South West local authority was castigated by local newspapers as well as The Daily Mail and The Telegraph after documents published earlier this week showed that the weekly green waste collection service had generated 460,000 since the council opted to charge for collections in April 2011.
Local newspapers, such as The Citizen, canvassed local residents who expressed disgust at the council generating a net income of nearly half a million pounds from the 36-per-bin service. This was echoed by The Telegraph which labelled the scheme a stealth bin tax.
However, the councils deputy leader Councillor Steve Morgan was quick to defend the service and accused the newspapers of getting their sums badly wrong.
He said: To say that we are making a huge profit is ludicrous in the extreme. We had some additional initial set up costs to cover electronic payments and marketing that accounted for around 40,000. But that is not the overall cost of the service.
Our critics have got their sums badly wrong. When we published our three year money programme earlier in the year we had lengthy debates about this service. We explained that this is an optional service and not one that local authorities are obliged to provide.
He added that the cost to operate the service was 740,000-a-year and, therefore, it was intended to become self-financing over the next three years.
Further to this, Cllr Morgan contested the grief among householders expressed in the local newspapers. He said: Local people told us that they would be prepared to pay a reasonable additional charge in order to keep it. We have been delighted by the response and by the number of people who have signed up.
Report
According to a report issued to the councils overview and scrutiny committee on June 6, there were 14,000 households with subscriptions to the service as of May 14 2011. This was said to have generated 460,000 of net income, with it costing 40,000 to set up the service.
And, the council claims that 36 charge per bin equates to approximately 1.50 per collection. It added that, having introduced the scheme in February 2011, subscriptions would run from February to September 30 2012 for the 2011/12 subscription period.
Cllr Morgan said: We are providing a discount so in the very initial introduction residents who signed on were being offered 18 months service for the cost of just 12 months payments. The income generated so far may mean that we are slightly ahead of our predicted savings target but we are most certainly not making a profit.
And, Cllr Morgan added that the 36 charge was very reasonable when compared to subscription-based green waste services in operation across the UK which, he said, ranged in cost from 30 to 60 per year.
He added: To say that we are making a profit is rubbish and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the councils financial situation.
Introducing charges for green waste collections has become increasingly prominent in light of local authorities facing squeezed budgets following the Comprehensive Spending Review, with Reading borough council and Oxford city council among those to move to a subscription-based scheme.
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