Scrutiny Committee delves into green bins

Some of the issues raised on Rik Smith's guest blog on the green bin charge LINK came up at the Brent Scrutiny Committee last night.

Cllr Duffy expressed doubts about the report's claim that the charge had not resulted in more garden waste going into grey bins but Chris Whyte, head of Environment Management, said that this had been confirmed by 'visual inspections', officers would take it up if it became apparent there was a problem.

Duffy said that he would expect weekly, rather than fortnightly, collections of the blue bin dry recycling, should have resulted in less going into the residual grey bins, but this had not been the case. Whyte said this could be accounted for by an increase in the borough's population, an explanation that Duffy did not accept.  Former environment lead member Cllr Keith Perrin asked if the council were collecting enough dry recycling now to merit weekly collections.

Dumped Christmas trees in Chalkhill Friday January 8th 2016

Officers were urged to do more to increase take up of compost bins by residents. Fly-tipping was a major concern with the report claiming that after an initial surge there had been no substantial increase in the fly-tipping of garden waste but Cllr Southwood conceded that the council needed to be more pro-active regarding the collection of Christmas trees. Chris Whyte said that the council had an obligation to pick up any tree left in the street and did not want residents without green bins to put them into blue bins as this would encourage them to use them for organic waste throughout the year.

There was close questioning on contamination  of dry recycling by organic waste and of the additional cost of fly-tipping. Although fly-tipping came under a single contract charge by Veolia, so there was no additional charge for any increase in fly-tipping, it did cost in terms of an increase in landfill tax.

There was extensive discussion on making the 'Cleaner Brent' smart phone app LINK more widely known and it was agreed that it could be demonstrated at Brent Connects meetings.

On missing statistics for Q3 in the report Chris Whyte explained that the figures would be available but there was a lag in gathering the data from various data points.

The Committee agreed a recommendation from Cllr Nerva that the council consider distributing organic waste collection bags at libraries and other centres (he suggested five bags for £10) so that residents without green bins or compost bins could recycle at kerbside.

The issue of dry recycling and organic waste collections from flats and multi-occupied houses continues to be an issue and there were calls for enforcement of an obligation via the licensing scheme for landlords to ensure efficient recycling.

Cllr Duffy asked why Veolia had retained £40,000 of the £120,000 additional revenue from the better than expected take-up of the green bin charge. He had fought for the council to retain the whole amount. Chris Whye said that this had been reinvested by Veolia in an additional vehicle to cope with the 3,000  extra green bin customers. Duffy was not satisfied with this, suggesting that Veolia's initial costing must have included some leeway for extra capacity.

Intervening Cllr Perrin said he was concerned that there didn't seem to have be a mechanisom for the allocation of the £120,000 including the retention of £40,000 be Veolia. Was it a one off payment or an annual charge?

The chair, Cllr Kelcher, allowed me to ask a question from the public gallery. I asked about the claim in the report (6.1) that 35% of the reduction in green waste collected would be because it 'would no longer be produced'. I suggested that there was a wider environmental consideration here including the paving over of front gardens to reduce vegetation or the burningof garden waste affecting already poor air quality in the borough.  Chris Whyte had no information on this but said it was a consideration.

Is Brent Green Bin Tax a success?

Brent Scrutiny Committee will tonight discuss a report on the charge for Green Bin collections. In this guest blog Rik Smith considers the claims made in the report.
 

Since March 2015, Brent council introduced a £40 charge for households to have “green waste” collected regularly (ish) - before this point, most households had a green wheely bin which was collected weekly.

The Brent Scrutiny Committee agreed to review the impact of the changes to the “Garden Waste Service” (or known as the Green Bin tax by most residents) after 9 months of operation.

The green bin tax was anticipated to achieve the following outcomes:

A.    Deliver £378,000 financial savings

B.    Improve and extend the council’s recycling offer

C.    Reduce the amount of waste generated overall

D.    Better comply with the national waste hierarchy

It would be reasonable to expect cover these issues. The report can be found HERE

Overall, it’s not exactly the next PD James novel, but it does contain a significant amount of back slapping and a modest amount of retrospective learning - from the operational difficulty in dealing with ~20,000 requests to “opt in” and pay £40 for the waste collections.

In summary:

●      A) was over achieved due to greater than anticipated sign up

●      B) Brent will suggest that weekly blue bin (dry recycling) addresses this

●      C) not clear – as I will explain below.

●      D) dependent upon the outcome of C

Detail 

Deliver £378,000 financial savings

Brent estimated that 17,000  (15%) of households would sign up to the green bin tax, in reality, 20,000  (18%) signed up. This lead to the council receiving £480,000, a £3 profit for each household that signed up over and above the original target This is a modest surplus per additional household, but may also explain why the coucil are already suggesting that the green bin tax won’t increase next year - or suggest that their poor estimations led to them overcharging for the service. Another interpretation is of course that Brent is getting shafted by Veolia.

I say poor estimation because the sign up was 3,000 more than the 17,000 estimated, that’s a 17%  forecast error. It’s in the councils interest to understate the forecast for the following reasons. Low forecast leads to:

●      “higher than expected uptake” headlines, helping spin the introduction of the green bin tax in  a positive light

●      Bonus extra cash if forecast is exceeded because the cost per household is set to recover costs over a smaller number

●      Low probability of making a loss on the new scheme

Reduce the amount of waste generated overall

This is where spin on the green bin tax starts to wear a bit thin. It’s also worth remembering that at the same time as the green bin tax was introduced, we moved to weekly blue bin collections.

First a rather odd assertion, that moving from collecting the blue top bins (dry recycling) bins from every 2 weeks, to weekly would have zero impact - thoroughly implausible!

"It was also anticipated that the changes would have no significant impact on the council’s recycling rate. This was because it was predicted that the amount of dry recycling collected by the weekly service would remain the same”

I know before weekly blue bin collections i was regularly faced with an overflowing blue bin, so some residual cans or boxes went into the grey bin. If my experience is partially replicated across some of the 110,000 households then from April 2015 the council should expect grey bin (residual waste) volumes to FALL and blue bin (dry recycling) volumes to INCREASE - keep this in mind for later.

“whilst the amount of collected organic waste would reduce, it would be mainly displaced to home composting or to the council’s Recycling Centre at Abbey Road”

The rate of “organic waste” collected from households and recycling centres has fallen by 3,248 tonnes between April and October. This is equivalent to 72 kgs of organic waste for each of the 45,000 green bins that the council removed from residents. i’d estimate that to be 2, maybe 3 wheely bins FULL of grass or hedge trimmings. Composting this amount of green waste would require more than just a garden Dalek composting thing, and will soon mount up.

So what’s happening to this stuff if it’s not being collected? Yes some is probably being composted at home, but I’d argue the rest is going to landfill. However, the scrutiny report appears to ignore / gloss over this waste stream. The amount that goes to landfill is costing the council £82.60 for every tonne - this cost is glossed over and lost (and probably ignored) in the opaque mystery benefits stated earlier.

Furthermore, the report states

“... the service changes appear to have had a positive impact on the borough’s recycling rate, and have had no noticeable impact on residual waste (grey bin) tonnages”

The report appears to come to this conclusion with some very simplistic, and rather misleading graph below.

The blue bars are 2014, red bars 2015. The green Bin Tax was introduced on 31st March 2015 - so the very end of Q1.

The graph shows that Q2 2015 grey bin tonnages were more than in 2014 and that they increased by a greater amount between Q1 and Q2 in 2015 than they did in 2014. so I’d argue that there was an impact.

The GLARING omission is of course, Q3 and  Q4 2015 data. as a reminder Q2 is April to June and Q3 is July to September - arguably the time when gardeners would expect to cut the grass, prune hedges, weeding, and general maintenance in the garden during the summer. The exclusion of Q3 data in a report written to cover the 9 months from March is incompetent, but at worse it’s deliberately misleading. By the time the report was published, most of Q4 should have passed, allowing the council to make a reasonable estimate of Q4 volumes.

One data point is nowhere near enough data to draw any conclusions or make any decisions; instead more data should be presented.

Has Brent reduced the amount of waste generated overall? Probably, but only because some people will compost some of the waste themselves, even if all other green waste goes into the grey bin.

Better comply with the national waste hierarchy and does it now comply better with the national waste hierarchy?

Source LINK

Effecitvely, the idea is to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (then dump the rest) - in the process produce high quality (pure) recyclable material, and the smallest volume of landfill.

This is supported by the “landfill Tax” which is currently £82.60 and payable by councils and commercial producers of landfill waste.

The datum (singular data point) shows an increase in the amount of grey bin waste, and hides the impact in Q3 and Q4. it also hides the likely beneficial impact of the weekly blue bin collections and the likely replacement / uplift volume of green waste being diverted to landfill.

The diversion to landfill would be contrary to the national waste hierarchy, the fact these two events coincide make it very difficult to unpick the size of the impact of each on landfill waste, we can only look at the net impact.

in conclusion, there are a number of unanswered questions

1.     How much residual waste was produced in Q3 and Q4 2015 - and why wasn’t this included in this report?

2.     How much green waste did they estimate would be diverted to landfill by bin tax avoiding residents, and have they budgeted for this?

3.     How much green waste was collected in the 45,000 green bins removed from residents?

4.     Did the council intentionally under-estimate the green bin tax uptake, leading to overcharging residents?

5.     How does Brent’s performance compare to other councils in London and England that have introduced a similar Green Bin Tax?

Garden Tax and waste changes start from today

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Brent Council's new waste collection service came into force today which includes the £40 annual green garden waste charge.  Lorraine Skinner, local environmental video artist and activist, has made the above video giving her view on the changes.

Meanwhile a resident on Barn Hill has sent a photograph of the dumping of garden waste near the car park at the top of the hill. She fears that there will be more as a result of people trying to avoid the charge.

Brent Cabinet approve £40 annual charge for green waste despite protests

Despite representations by local resident Martin Redston and a written submission from Brent Friends of the Earth, Brent's Cabinet approved changes to the waste collection system this afternoon.

This will include a £40 annual fee for the collection of green waste, a weekly waste food caddy collection and weekly blue bin dry recyclable collection.

Martin Redston spoke to the Cabinet about the difficult of composting large branches ansd took along some samples. He said that some residents only need a few green waste collections a year coinciding with specific times in the gardening calendar. He  pointed out that cross subsidies already exist across the different levels of services residents receive.

The discussion in the Cabinet suggested that Brent's priority was to increase dry recycling rates and that member residents required more frequent blue top bin collections - the £40 charge would help fund this.

The statement from Brent Friends of the Earth LINK was read out but the Cabinet went on to approve the changes, including the £40 charge.

It is worth pointing out that the Council only set out the specification for the new Public realm contract last year with the report  LINK to the Executive in October 2013, less than one year ago, with no mention of these suggested changes and  certainly the introduction of charges in the specification.

However this paragraph is significant:

-->

During the competitive dialogue process the financial outlook for local government has deteriorated further and Brent Council now faces a budget shortfall of £20m in 2014/15’.

The Medium Term Financial Plan is currently being changed to revise the £55m shortfall between 2014/15 and 2016/17 and will be communicated to members shortly. As a result officers asked bidders to identify other savings options which were not part of the financial evaluation. Within the contract there is a change control mechanism that will help the authority and Veolia to accurately price any service changes during the life of the contract, ensuring that prices are transparent and fair to both parties.

'Both parties' here refers to the Council and Veolia - are they transparent and fair to residents?

 Shahrar Ali, Brent Green Party spokesperson on the environment, said:

--> Brent's latest proposal to implement a green bin charge is ill-thought out. Environmentally, it sends the wrong signal to residents keen to recycle garden waste that is too thick or bulky to do so in their back gardens, but can be managed borough-wide. It discriminates against those who may be unable to do their own composting due to disabilities or other valid reasons. Also it treats residual grey bin waste fit for landfill as somehow more worthy of free collection than recyclable matter in the waste hierarchy. Financially, the imposition of such a flat charge for green bins is extraordinarily expensive for householders already facing real terms cuts in living standards. The Brent administration is clearly out of touch with the everyday pressures people face and its own environmental responsibilities, even to propose such a change,Comments on Wembley Matters and the Kilburn Times website include fears that in order to avoid the charges people  will resort to the fly-tipping of garden waste or its burning, leading to increased air pollution, and it might even accelerate the paving over of gardens.

The current charges for Brent's Household Reuse and Recycling Centre can be found HERE