Interim Report on Waste & Recycling Service by Environment & Housing Scrutiny Panel

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on December 29, 2012 at 14:13

Karen, I see that despite the subject of the post probably being the issue on which more HoL pixels have been expended than any other this year, this post has only had 66 views and no comments. I wonder if that's to do with the indigestibility of the report and a lack of understanding (if people are anything like me) about what the recommendations will mean and how they will be implemented followed up. 

I wonder if a new post which briefly extracted the key points and set out a clear route to action / monitoring would attract more interest?

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Permalink Reply by ant on December 30, 2012 at 9:12

I didn't bother commenting because the report seemed like a waste of time, i was disappointed with some of the names of the authors for letting it be such a fudge, but perhaps they didn't really have much control. It read like some marketing blurb that tried to put the best possible spin on the situation and not really change anything significant.

They did a survey that the report claimed "Overall, the survey responses indicate an overwhelmingly positive response to the new system", but the survey only had 142 responses, I don't know who got sent the survey, i never saw it (it wasn't on HoL was it?) and it seemed like they didn't really want to find what most residents really thought and the questions were probably phrased so that you couldn't tell them anyway. Despite lots of photos of bins they didn't really say what was to be done about all the bins. We were originally told the report would look at if we were getting value for money from the new rubbish collection but didn't look at that at all.

What typified the whole pointlessness of it all was that one of purposes of the report was to see what might be done better in the phase 3 roll out by looking at how phases 1 and 2 went, but phase 3 was already being rolled out before the report was done.

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Permalink Reply by LSquared on December 29, 2012 at 22:10

This is how I interpreted it:

The context for the report is the decision to roll out the new waste system to phase 3, ie the East of Haringey. The survey is of residents in phases 1 and 2. The recommendations were for phase 3, and therefore we would have seen any results in the phase 3 rollout.

My understanding from the report is that by phase 3 the council knew what sort problems were going to be caused to the general populace by non-compliant neighbours but put nothing concrete in place to address them. Emphasis is on "engagement" and "liasing", with no sanctions other than waste not being collected which punishes the neighbours as well.

The report highlights problems with non-compliance, garden crowding and side waste and how this affects neighbours. It states clearly these need to be managed, but gives no practical recommendation on how beyond "engagement" and "liasing" even though the case study showed this had not been successful. The problem of HMOs is buck-passed to "a general shift in emphasis towards holding to account those landlords whose properties are kept below minimum standards" Given the recommendations from other borough include "Rules relating to not collecting side waste or contaminated bins should be rigorously enforced", my impression is that it is preferable to let neighbours suffer rather than accomodate non-compliant behaviour. I am disappointed that the "recommendations" did not include concrete plans for how these known and expected problems would be dealt with.

Secondly, the report states that "Overall, the survey responses indicate an overwhelmingly positive response to the new system. Concerns focus on the consistency of how the four main problems (as listed above) are dealt with on an ongoing basis." I disagree that the response is overwhelmingly positive. Although most indicators were positive, each satisfaction indicator is taken in isolation so we have no idea whether the populace whom the council serve consider the improvement in their own recycling to outweigh the degradation in their environment from their non-compliant neighbours.

I also note that the positive responses are about the things they can control ie their own use of the service, while the negative are about the effects on them from others' failure to use it. I think it is very Iikely that the sort of people who responded to the survey are also the sort of people who will act responsibly with regards to recycling, and therefore the survey is likely to overstate the appetite of the general public to make the behaviour changes required to avoid the negative impacts.

(For what it's worth I think fixing waste and recycling issues are outside any council's scope and budget. The solution has to come from the source by (1) minimising the waste produced in the first place, and (2) putting the cost of disposal/recycling on the upfront cost of purchase. But that is for another thread)

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