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Waste management? Send for the Sopranos Richard Littlejohn "It is not the job of our waste teams to collect wheeled bins from driveways... However, in this instance and as a gesture of goodwill, as long as the bin contains only appropriate waste and has its lid closed, we will return to collect it." There you have the authentic voice of local government in Britain today, in this case one Dennis Pennill, who styles himself "waste service manager" of Rochdale council, in Lancashire. He was attempting to justify the refusal of his dustmen to empty the bin of Mrs Patricia Pilkington, on the grounds that it was all of 12 inches from the pavement and therefore classified as "not out for collection". Mrs Pilkington, 64, saw the dustmen discussing her bin before they drove off. She suffers from arthritis in both knees and was unable to chase after them. When she rang the council to complain, she was told it was her own fault. The bin should have been put out on the pavement, not left a foot within the boundary of her property. And as Dennis Pennis, or whatever his name is, explained: "It is not our job to collect wheeled bins from driveways." What the hell does he think is the job of a - dustman? It's bad enough that Rochdale council, like so many others, has refuse collections only every fortnight. Now they're looking for any excuse, any loophole, not to collect the rubbish at all. In the time the dustmen spent measuring the distance of Mrs Pilkington's wheelie bin from the road and debating whether it complied with the council's official definition of "out for collection", they could have emptied the damn thing and been on their way. Forget, for a moment, the fact that it's far more sensible to leave your bin just off the footpath. If she had shoved it into the middle of the pavement, no doubt Mrs P would have had the 'elf 'n' safety nazis down on her like a ton of hot horse manure for obstructing the carriageway, posing a hazard to pedestrians, wheelchair users and mothers with prams. When did emptying the bins become a "gesture of goodwill"? That's what we pay our increasingly extortionate council taxes for. It's about the only universal "service" we all use. Even then, the graceless Dennis Pennis couldn't just admit his men screwed up. The proper thing to do would have been to send round a special collection team, with a nice bunch of flowers to apologise for any inconvenience. Instead, he started muttering dark threats about ensuring her bin contained "only appropriate waste" and that its lid was shut. Then, and only then, might he deign to empty it. Dennis Pennis's disgraceful attitude is typical of the contempt in which government, at every level, holds the paying public. As council tax has doubled under Labour, so- called "services" have got worse. Local authorities devote their energies to dreaming up new ways not to do their job, while at the same time inventing exciting rules and regulations with which to punish, intimidate and fine the rest of us. Nowhere is this more apparent than in refuse collection. This used to be a pretty simple task. We'd leave the rubbish out; they'd collect and dispose of it. Now we are expected to sort our household waste into half a dozen different boxes, coloured sacks and bins, and leave them out on the right day in exactly the correct spot, no doubt determined and monitored by GPS from a command centre at the town hall. They're already installing microchips in dustbins to spy on us. More than 30,000 householders have been fined for putting out their bins on the wrong day, or depositing the wrong kind of rubbish in the wrong sack. Throw your junk mail in a litter bin on your way to work and you'll end up with a criminal record. I read recently of a householder in North London who woke in the early hours of the morning to find two men clattering around by his dustbins. Assuming they were burglars, he was about to call the police when he noticed from the back of their donkey jackets that they were members of the local council "environmental protection team" checking that he hadn't put plastic or paper in the box for bottles. It's come to this. Councils would rather pay people to sort through our dustbins in the dead of night than empty them. As I've written before, we are all happy to do our bit towards recycling, but this is nothing short of monstrous - the Punishment State in full cry. And the Number One enthusiast for all this is David Miliband, the man who so many people think should be Prime Minister. It was his environment department which sent out the circular advising councils to scrap weekly collections in the name of saving the planet. They would rather leave an arthritic pensioner with a bin full of stinking household waste for a month, just to serve their own sense of selfimportance and righteousness. It's well documented that most of our carefully recycled refuse ends up being put on barges and towed to China, where it's burned, thus adding to global carbon emissions. This has got nothing to do with the environment, it's about showing us who's boss. Will any candidate at the forthcoming local elections have the guts to stand up and promise a return to weekly collections and an end to all this petty punishment culture? Don't bank on it. The only answer is to remove government from rubbish collection altogether and let us deal directly with private contractors, who would do the whole job more cheaply, more efficiently and without any of this pathetic, political posturing. It's time to send for the Sopranos. They're big in waste management. Perhaps, while they're at it, they could ensure Rochdale's garbage gauleiter, Dennis Pennis, ends up at the bottom of a remote landfill site in a wheelie bin with the lid firmly secured. As a gesture of goodwill. ---------------------------------------------------
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