Ron Storer, Conservative Candidate for Kingstanding with Kingstanding's Conservative Councillor, Gary Sambrook
Residents who want binmen to cart-off their grass cuttings now have to pay £35, those who don’t buy into the scheme face trips to the tips. To date, only 20,000 of the city’s 400,000 householders have forked out the fee. If you’ve visited Lifford Lane Tip in recent days, you’ll be well aware of the massive queues, which have resulted in residents having to wait in excess of an hour to dispose of their green garden waste and bulky items.
This is doing nothing for the air quality in the area, for free movement of traffic in the area, or for people’s frayed tempers, where there have been reports of the police being called. Another knock on effect Labour’s unfair garden tax charges are the piles of green bags everywhere. The Council’s Labour leaders are actually paying staff to seek out these bags, not to take them away, but to stick yellow labels on them, telling people the Council no longer collects the old bags and to dispose of them themselves. Some people have then taken their bags off the streets. Some have not.
No matter where in Birmingham you live in, you only have to look around your own streets to see piles of garden waste bags with yellow stickers on. If the owners don’t dispose of the bags, and the Council won’t take them away, what is to happen? Birmingham is soon going to look very untidy indeed if these piles of green bags stay there.
Did the Labour Councillors who brought in these charges think things through? Did they work out what to do if residents stubbornly refused to move the green waste outside their houses? How do you prove which house the bags come from? Did they make provision for the obvious increase of traffic there would be at our tips once the charges were brought in?
Simon Jevon, local resident and Conservative Candidate for Kings Norton
If the Council are paying staff to attach yellow stickers on bags of garden, as well as making changes to our local tips to accommodate the extra capacity generated. Would it not have been easier just to keep garden waste collection free? The public would have liked it too, after all, isn’t the Council here to serve the public?