Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Veolia continued
I had a window open and registered that the bin wasn't being moved and went out and was able to stop one of the workers to challenge him. He very kindly came back and we looked in our recycling.
What I learned is that Veolia won't collect your bin if it contains polystyrene, even if it has a big triangular stamp showing it is recyclable and how. Plant pots, also with a recycling stamp, are the 'wrong sort of plastic'.
So our bin got a ticket. The Veolia worker explained that if it happens again, I will be spoken to. And should it happen a third time Veolia will issue a fine.
So, Veolia don't do what they are supposed to (take recycling) and have the power to impose a fine on citizens trying to recycle.
I don't recall be consulted about this, I have not received any information from the council advertising it. And who on earth thinks it is a good idea to give Veolia power to levy fines, when it struggles to perform its basic function. A win-win situation for Veolia.
Islington Council has moved waste and cleaning back in-house. Camden and other councils have sacked Veolia. If anyone from Haringey Council is reading: please can we end the contract with Veolia? Or can we have an explanation of why a consistently bad service is thought to be acceptable to Haringey citizens?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anette on
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Veolia will issue a FINE??? HAHAHAHAHA! Good luck with that, I'd love to see them try to collect the money and justify that one. I doubt it's in their contract that they can fine residents. They're a bunch of not very good bin men. That's all. And you would be "spoken to"? Great! That means you can communiate with them, which is a privilege very few of us have had. Dump some more of the wrong stuff, post on here when, and anyone with an outstanding issue can show up to speak to them. Good grief, is there no end to the liberties this bunch of bell-ends will take?
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Permalink Reply by Christopher Fowler on
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Since all the stuff has to be sorted anyway - Haringey council having opted for the easiest method, mixed collection - surely it would make more sense, and encourage more recycling, for Haringey and its agents Veolia to be more flexible? Also, it's hard for even the most "eco-aware" to know which kinds of plastic are which. Added to the fact that much packaging has a mix of types of plastic - PP, PEP, HDPE etc etc. Things are only going to get worse with both collection of recycling/compostables and "black bin rubbish", as the amount Haringey is paying Veolia is apparently going down, which can only make the service worse. At the end of the day, the problem is reductions in funding from central taxation to local councils, which is because the Tories want to give money to their rich banker friends, and not to help with such irrelevancies as rubbish collection. It's the privatisation policies of Thatcher, Major, and (to the eternal shame of the Labour Party) Blair, that have meant money-grubbing creeps like Veolia are able to get away with stealing public money, while underpaying the people who do the work, working them like slaves, and taking away their holiday, pension,sick pay and other conditions of employment. At least if rubbish collection were "in-house" we'd know the people doing it had decent terms and conditions, and the whole service would be directly, democratically accountable to us through our councillors.
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Permalink Reply by Neville Collins on
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@ Christopher Fowler
The reason for why Haringey's refuse and recycling collection was privatised in the first place was for the fact for many years the in-house service was crap. I remember the time when they couldn't deliver a good weekly service for weeks on end. We can criticise Veolia for not delivering right now, but do we want to go back to what things were before? Stick with what we have now.
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Permalink Reply by Isabelle on
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Really? Was the service crap before Veolia?!?
I don't recall ever having to log a complaint before them.
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I think the service was OK before it was out-sourced to Veolia. And it was out-sourced under government pressure for competitive tenders, for ideological reasons, under the doctrine of "private good, public bad". I've been living here since 1989, and all the real problems have arisen since Veolia took over.
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Permalink Reply by Charlotte on
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I think the service used to be very good and I have been in Haringey since 1986. Now it is a mess but maybe worsened by the bi-weekly collections. A lot of front gardens/front of buildings look an absolute mess and are becoming very smelly - maybe because Veolia are refusing to collect?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Christopher, that may possibly be true for your street and local neighbourhood. It wasn't true for most of the ward I represent and many of the adjacent streets.
People on HoL can have a long fruitless: "Oh-yes-it-was" ; "Oh no it wasn't ", string of comments which get us nowhere. Partly because we may be comparing different neighbourhoods; and partly because we may not even agree on what constitutes "evidence".
And it's not just individual residents' perceptions. Many years ago I seem to remember the Council boasting about some award for clean streets. My thought at the time was: "Which streets did these idiots inspect?"
It wasn't just that I constantly reported incidents of dumping. It was also that dumps often stayed put; they seemed invisible. It got to the point sometimes where I deliberately held back from reporting to see if Enterprise or Accord would notice a problem.
I had a look in my 'back catalogue' and it turns out I had my first digital camera earlier than I remembered. Here's a pile of rubbish outside 258 High Road N15 on 17 March 2003. Below it, the same, plus some extra stuff on 8 April 2003.
Below, my photo from 16 May 2003. It shows some sort of empty electrical box which on the traffic island in Broad Lane, opposite Page Green. It was used as an unofficial litter bin. The street cleaning staff had dealt with the increasing and overflowing waste by taping a plastic bag around it.
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Good point Alan. I lived on Alexandra Road and we did have a fabulous bin collection and they would always collect our rubbish - all of it. At xmas I used to chase down the street to give them a "drink". Now, I feel I am tidying up every week after the collection and I have no inclination to give them a tip. A shame because I am sure they are all decent guys, but pushed to the limit to empty riculous amounts of bins so they have to dump the bins any which way.
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Alan - You could go down Green Lanes at the right time of day, any day of the week, now and take similar pictures. A couple of snapshots prove nothing. And as far as I'm concerned, it stands to reason that if you cut and cut the funding for rubbish collection, street cleaning and recycling, and outsource it to private companies that cream off the profits, then you are going to get a worse service.
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If it was just "a couple of snapshots", then you'd be right, Christopher. But it's slightly more. My Flickr photoblog has about 3000 photo. Most are not about dumping and litter. But several hundred are. And not just snapshots but some discussion of the issues and suggestions for change.
Over the years I've also collaborated with Liz Ixer who has an interesting and very constructive 'take' on these issues. Here's a link to her Flickr pages which mention the word "rubbish".
Just to be clear, I'm not a privatiser and I'm not rushing to Veolia's defence. Nor am I parroting the Labour Party 'line'.
I'm not claiming that either my or Liz's photos give a scientifically reliable sample. Nor that the streets and parks and alleys I happen to walk though are typical or representative.
But whether I'm criticising or complimenting, I try to base my views, conclusions, and suggestions on evidence.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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A quick P.S. Christopher, having thought more about your post. One of my points from these examples is that piles of dumping used to hang around for days or sometimes for weeks. Usually acting as an implicit 'invitation' for more litter and dumping.
As many people have pointed out, Veolia's purple bags left uncollected have this sort of "magnet" effect.
If you're saying that currently on Green Lanes there are spots where the same rubbish is not removed for days, then something is seriously wrong.
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Alan, I think you are right that dumped rubbish acts as a magnet, but in my experience (limited to walking along Green Lanes and around the area generally), that kind of fly-tipped rubbish does not last long, and gets taken away. I think the problems a lot of us experience with Veolia is more to do with the standard of household collection, and the fact that it is often a bit erratic and unreliable. I suspect this is because the service is over-stretched because Veolia under-bid to get the contract.
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