Hooray for the Local Government Association!

I sent them an email to express my support for the 'War on Waste' campaign they have just launched. The campaign involves proposals to tax people who do not recycle their household waste. I received the following interesting email, with more details about the scheme, in reply...

Dear Mr Howat
Thankyou for your comments regarding the launch of the Local Government Association 'War on Waste campaign' that was launched this week.

I will be passing on your comments to Cllr Bettison, and I am sure he will be delighted by your support. I also wanted to let you know a couple of the points of what the campaign is trying to do and say.

In terms of the 'save as you throw' proposals, we are very keen to stress that this would not be an extra tax. The way it would work is that there would be a cut in council tax and then you would pay for the rubbish you throw away. The UK is the only country in Europe (and indeed most of the western world) that doesn't have some sort of scheme like this. One argument that has been put forward to me is that we would not expect to pay, say, £300 for as much petrol as we wanted to drive our cars on the roads for the year - we have to pay for it by the gallon. In that respect why should rubbish be any different?

If I may, I would like to make a couple of other points. We are not calling for every council in the country to use these powers. If the local people and the council felt it was the best way forward to help cut the amount of rubbish thrown away then that would be up to them. As a country, we are facing some tough challenges in the long term. We are running out of landfill space and the UK is set to be hit with landfill fines by the European Union if it doesn't reduce its' reliance on simply throwing away our rubbish - which according to the National Audit Office, will mean that by 2013 councils, and therefore taxpayers, will be subjected to £205million in fines. Not only that, but the cost of throwing our rubbish away is going to almost double to £4.2billion by 2013.

We are anxious that council tax and bills that council taxpayers are kept as low as possible and therefore, by cutting the amount of waste we throw away each year, we can keep bills down.

On a final note, our campaign is not just about local people and throwing rubbish away and hopefully in the coming weeks you will see the LGA turn its attention away from what local people can do to what manufacturers can do. Over the coming weeks we will be targeting the producers of rubbish as well. From supermarkets who wrap their coconuts in clingfilm, to the amount of junk mail, to the amount of space taken up by disposable nappies, we will heap the pressure on those who make the waste in the first place to try and help them to help us keep council tax bills down and preserve the environment for future generations.

I hope this provides some information on what we are hoping to achieve.

Kind regards

Richard Stokoe
Chief Media Officer
Local Government Association