Wheelie bins roll out

Every household in Acocks Green should be receiving one or other of these cards to identify whether your property has been assessed as suitable for a wheelie bin.

Here's some key points:

If you disagree with the assessment of your property, you can challenge it - either if you have been denied a bin or have been deemed suitable.

If you need a larger bin for your non-recyclable waste, please let the council know by Tuesday 2 September. Properties with more than six residents can request a larger bin and those with more than nine can ask for an even larger bin.

If you need help moving your bin for collection, then the council will provide assisted collections - just as they do now.

There is NO CHARGE for either of these bins.

Collection days may change - the details will be provided when your bin is delivered. For Acocks Green, collection days will be either Wednesday or Thursday.

Bins should be delivered between the end of September and mid November.

The first collections will be during the week beginning 24 November.

The bins DO contain a chip, but this simply identifies the property to which the bin belongs.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask - but the bins team will be at the Ward Committee Meeting on the 10 September, 7pm in the Library, ready to give you some answers.

Wheelie bin survey results

Next Monday, the cabinet of Birmingham City Council will meet and agree the roll out programme for wheelie bins across Birmingham. The current plans envisage that the deployment will reach our local depot in the autumn of 2014, so we've got about a year to wait for them to reach Acocks Green.

What is interesting is the survey work done in the two trial wards - Brandwood and Harborne. 417 people across both wards were interviewed face to face prior to the roll out and there was then a follow-up telephone interview with the same people after the bins had been put into use. These were the individuals with primary responsibility for recycling in a household. The data is weighted to ensure that their backgrounds are a balance that matches the ward, so we can have some decent confidence in the data. 

Prior to the launch, 35% strongly supported the introduction of wheeled bins, 28% tended to support them, 22% were undecided, 7% tended to oppose and 8% strongly opposed them. When they were re-interviewed, the shift was quite marked. Now 53% strongly supported them and 23% tended to support, with 11% being neutral and just 4% tending to oppose, although 9% strongly oppose. That shows 63% initially in favour, rising to 76% in favour once they actually had a chance to use the service. The neutrals seemed to have shifted in favour and the total of those opposed has slipped back by a couple of points, although it is interesting that there has been a very slight hardening of those strongly opposed. Interestingly, this is pretty close to the figures produced by a YouGov survey in 2011, which showed 77% with a positive view of wheeled bins, 14% with a negative view and 9% undecided. (Oddly, LibDem voters are most in favour). 

Although this is still early days and only relating to two of our forty wards, the sample shows that 31% feel that wheelie bins have encouraged them to recycle more, compared to 20% who thought it would when surveyed prior to implementation. Curiously, 6% think that they recycle less than before, double the 3% who thought that they would reduce their recycling. The actual results speak for themselves - residual waste (black bag) collection amounts have dropped by 24% across the wards, while the mixed (glass/plastic) recyling has increased by 40% and paper has increased by 20%. That would be a pretty impressive achievement if it could be sustained, but I would expect variable increases in recycling once the system is fully rolled out, although all the evidence suggests that this change will encourage far greater recycling.

Despite this positive news, however, there's always one who has to find the downside. This week, it is Cllr Jon Hunt, who is leading the charge and has managed to get a story into the Mail claiming that the budget costs have doubled since last year.

Unfortunately for the thrust of the story, they haven't.

Borrowing was always part of the picture and the Liberal Democrats know this. It has been covered at previous cabinet meetings and in scrutiny committee too. A larger part of the modernisation project is funded through council spending and borrowing than is funded by the DCLG money.

But Jon doesn't stop there.

The council has already maxed out its credit card. Now it proposes to conjure another £8 million out of nowhere this year. It is staggering that senior councillors on the council have the brass neck to think they can spend even more money on this. 

Apart from the minor point that prudential borrowing isn't the same as a credit card (the Labour government gave councils the power to borrow to invest, something of which the Tory/Lib Dem administration took full advantage. If the card is maxed out, they are the ones who splashed the cash. 

The facts haven't changed - we need to modernise our waste collection operation. It was left with outdated facilities, worn-out vehicles and is entirely unfit to deal with the volumes that we expect to receive in the future and to deliver on the targets for recycling. 

The initial results from the trial wards look remarkably promising - the public are buying in and are making the effort to recycle more. The scheme is working and the opposition is getting increasingly desperate as they see their imagined political capital draining away. 

Do you hear the people's bins?

According to yesterday's Birmingham Mail, Cllr Deirdre Alden is shocked that the council have spent £29,000 on communicating with residents about the trial roll out of the wheelie bins in Brandwood and Harborne. I'm not sure if she expected us to just drop the bins off and not tell anybody, but I'm sure she would have had something to say about that if we had.

Given that this is the biggest change in decades to how Birmingham collects rubbish from residents and that there has been some appalling scaremongering from both the opposition parties - leaping aboard the bin wagon as they scent a few votes in 2014's local elections - communication with residents is vital. Last year, the scrutiny committee that monitors waste visited Manchester to see how their system works and one thing was absolutely clear - to make a proper waste management programme work, you need to educate the residents and that means communication for it to pay the dividends that it offers. If we want the changes to Birmingham's bins to be transformative, we have to communicate to people.

Each of those wards contains around 10-11,000 properties, most of which would have required information and one of the green or red cards to advise them whether they were selected for bins or bags. The costs of that are included in that top line £29,000 figure - as are the costs of the external supplier involved in supporting the council. That is, by the way, a tiny part of the £29 million winning bid.

A couple of years back, the last administration launched changes to the bin rounds to make them more efficient and kicked off with letters to 20,000 properties in Yardley, plus a telephone hotline and website. This will take a bit more work, thanks to the aforementioned scaremongering and also because the change is that much bigger. My favourite portent of doom is the threat that residents will have to pay £93 a month to have their bins cleaned. Needless to say, that's garbage.

Nobody doubts that this is a big change for the city, nor that some people will be worried about it. There are bound to be teething problems along the way - some will be ironed out during the trial rollouts, but different issues will arise in other wards and we'll fix them. At the end of it, though, we will have a transformed bin collection operation and things will settle down. Just as they have everywhere else.

Perhaps the most interesting story was the one last week, which revealed that wheelie bins have a 14 point approval rating already (50% approve, 36% disapprove), backed up by Birmingham Mail online polls that show 64-70% support. The quiet majority are turning up the volume.

Bins roll out in Birmingham

This week sees the start of the first ward trial of wheelie bins in Birmingham, with Brandwood ward receiving theirs, ready for use. They were on display at the Lord Mayor's Show on Monday and here's a glimpse inside the new recyclate bin. You can see the insert for paper and card in this picture, on the left side of the bin.  This stays in the bin and is separated by the collection crew into the truck. Other dry recyclate - plastic and cans - can be dropped down into the gap to the right and fills the bottom of the bin.

Obviously there were mixed views from members of the public, but the staff on the stand were very positive - there were more in favour than against and some people were really anxious to know when their ward was going to get the new bins. The decision hasn't been taken yet, but should be made over the next few months.

Yes, this is still about wheelie bins

We've got preliminary results from the wheelie bin consultation survey that is currently ongoing and they make interesting reading.

• 61% of respondents agree that wheelie bins will help to reduce the number of vermin in their neighbourhood (25% disagree and 14% didn't know)
• 58% agree wheelie bins will reduce the amount of rubbish spilt onto the street (31% disagree, 11% unsure)
• 51% think wheelie bins will improve the cleanliness of their neighbourhood (35% disagreed and 14% didn't know)
• 50% think wheelie bins will be good for the city (36% disagree and 14% are unsure)

That seems very reassuring - especially when you remember that apart from a few streets in Selly Oak, wheelie bins aren't even in use. A 2011 survey for YouGov found 77% support for wheelie bins nationally, with just 10% of respondents opposed to them. 

Want to have your say? Then go here. 

I think everybody appreciates that change - especially a change on this scale - makes some people worry. It isn't helped by some scaremongering from the opposition parties, warning people that they will face charges of £90 a month to clean their bins (they won't). There are bound to be problems with the switchover, but at least we have the chance to learn from the experience of the 82% of councils that have already made the switch and we'll have the experience from Brandwood and Harborne to build a Birmingham perspective on transforming our waste collection service. 

We've also got the figures from those wards on property suitability - 96.7% of low-rise homes in Brandwood and 91.9% of low-rise properties in Harborne have been initially assessed as suitable. Of the 16,000 properties identified as suitable for wheelie bins across both wards, only about 100 have challenged their assessment as suitable and there have also been some challenges raised by householders originally deemed unsuitable for wheelie bins. The assessment considers each property and if it has steep steps or slopes to the roadside, no storage space for wheelie bins or poor access for the wagons, then they will be deemed unsuitable for wheelie bins and red carded. They will continue to get the black bag service. I suspect that there will be wards that will have a higher number of unsuitable properties than either of these two and we've got to handle the switch sensitively. I'll certainly be making sure that properties are correctly assessed in Acocks Green and supporting residents who have been wrongly identified - but we're still a way away from that. 

Meanwhile, figures show that the government's changes to benefits will take over £9 million out of the Birmingham economy thanks to the bedroom tax alone. 

Diary Date - Yardley District Committee - Thursday 28 March 2013

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 28 March 2013 - 12 noon
Committee Rooms 3 & 4, Council House
And you can now watch online here.

Items on the agenda will be

• Revenue Budget Monitoring 2012/13, period 11
• Revenue Budget 2013/14
• Local Services Performance Report
• Tenant Engagement - Establishing a district housing panel
• Wheelie bin, recycling and refuse collection services - district consultation
• Birmingham Youth Service
• Amey - Highway Trees overview
• Work programme update 2012/13

This is a meeting open to the public and we've certainly seen significant use of the online streaming - far more have watched online than have attended these meetings in a year. 

Future meetings planned in:
6 June 2013; 18 July 2013; 12 September 2013; 21 November 2013; 16 January 2014; 27 March 2014

Wheelie Bin Consultation Starts

You can find the survey here. Fill it in and let us know YOUR views.

If you are so inclined, you can find my views here.

Diary Date - Acocks Green Ward Committee

Acocks Green Ward Committee
Wednesday 20 February 2013 - 7pm
Severne Road J&I, Severne Road

Items on the agenda will be

• BSEEN - Promoting and supporting Birmingham Energy Savers
• Planning update - planning officer attending to discuss commercial planning considerations and other issues. 
• Planning matters
• Community Chest
• Local Housing
• Wheeled bins consultation update
• Other issues of local concern

Look forward to seeing you there!

Next meetings: 

17 April 2013 - The Oaklands Primary School

29 May 2013 - Scout Hut, behind Scanlons on Spring Road

Wheelie Bins?

You may be aware that Eric Pickles offered a £250 million fund open to competitive bids from local authorities, ostensibly to help councils restore weekly bin collections - which Eric believes are a basic human right. The fact that best estimates suggest that it would cost something over £500 million to restore weekly collections may explain why only a single council actually bid to do that - Blackpool. Other local authorities have either used the cash offer to "protect" weekly rounds or to add something else to existing fortnightly collections. Birmingham submitted a bid for £29.5 million of that fund, that will increase the frequency of recycling collections for the quarter of the city that recycles the most, expand the rewards scheme, modernise our collection fleet and bring wheeled bins to about 90% of homes in the city. Although 40 bids were turned down, we had a bid sufficiently good enough to be allocated full funding as it delivered across the board exactly what the government wanted - Birmingham's bid received high praise for this. This will cover the capital costs of the service transformation. 

We've committed to consulting with residents as to how the scheme is introduced and to trialling it in two wards, to ensuring that it isn't a 'one size fits all' offer, so that where wheeled bins are entirely inappropriate, they will not be used. Assisted collections will be maintained, so that people who currently get help with handling their bin bags will get help with their wheeled bins (every round has a list of them, usually with a few more that the crews know about as well). Waste disposal has always been changing. BBC Four have had a couple of excellent programmes on recently about how we've dealt with rubbish, from the days when the old metal dustbins really did only contain dust, as food waste was put into bins for pig swill, through the expansion of rubbish as the economy recovered post-war and consumerism took hold, right through to the arrival of the black bag and their replacement by wheeled bins. 

I happen to believe that this will be good for Birmingham for a number of reasons, so I was disappointed to see the Liberal Democrat motion at the last council meeting, even more disappointed at the speeches and then at the call-in to scrutiny committee from the Tories last week. From the sound of it, you would believe that the 80% of authorities (including Solihull, Walsall, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Lichfield and Coventry) that use wheeled bins must have descended into some post-apocalyptic hell, where the few bins not blazing in the street are being used to help burglars enter your home. Still, given their current rate of electoral descent, you aren't surprised at seeing the Liberal Democrats leaping aboard any bandwagon that trundles past. Their reports don't match the reality of anywhere I've ever lived or been that has these bins. Indeed, on a fact finding expedition into the dystopia that must be Solihull since wheeled bins were introduced back in 2009, I didn't have to negotiate rows of aflame bins or dodge hordes of burglars leaping down from conveniently placed chunks of moulded plastic. Friends living outside Birmingham's borders confirm that my experience is not unusual.

Yes, some people will set some bins on fire - West Midlands Fire Service currently attend ten fires a day involving rubbish. Yes, some will be used to facilitate entry to properties by thieves - who currently manage it anyway. I note in passing that one police team in wheelie-bin infested Solihull have just reported that they've managed a whole month without a burglary from a property being reported.

Will they obstruct the streets? Their physical footprint is very similar to the recycling boxes that are currently used, so if left out they will offer the same level of obstruction. Visually, they are more intrusive, but shouldn't we balance that against the wider public good of increased recyling?

Their objections entirely fail to address the funding gap. We know that by the end of the decade, if we do anothing, we will face an £8 million gap in the finances of this service alone. We currently spend £1 million a year on bin bags - and residents add to that with the bags they buy themselves. If anyone tells you that they want to retain bin bags - as the Yardley Liberal Democrats decided a couple of weeks back - then they also need to tell you what other service should be axed to pay for it, as we face a bleak funding future from a brutal and uncaring Tory/Liberal Democrat government. I'd rather see us spend that £8 million on services for those most in need than on continuing a failing system. Currently, we spend about £75 per household on bin collection - this will cut that cost to under £40 per property. 

I've praised the work that was done to improve recycling in Birmingham over the past decade - including that by the last administration - but we can't rest on our laurels. We send very little to landfill, largely because we send it to Tyseley to be burnt to generate electricity. We currently have a waste system not fit for the future - an elderly fleet of vehicles, with breakdowns causing missed collections. Our streets are strewn with rubbish, feeding a growing population of rats, all because of ripped bags spilling their contents onto the highway. Rubbish collection is our most visible service and the £29.5 million from the government allows us to invest in it and turn it round. 

Contrary to some views, this isn't a hasty decision. Way back in 2007, a council review suggested using smaller wheeled bins for weekly residual collections and noted that giving residents a 140 litre wheeled bin for recycling would “considerably increase capacity.” Indeed, the report proposed constituency-level pilot programmes, but failed to actually put any money into them. The new plans envisage a standard 240 litre wheeled bin for recycling – an even greater opportunity for improving volume, especially when allied to the incentive scheme and weekly recycling collections for a quarter of the city. We have learnt from the 80% of councils that collect from wheeled bins – their experience is that these are safer for our workforce, they increase the volume of recycling, they are cheaper to operate and they help keep the streets cleaner. 

The same report raised two objections to wheeled bins - one of the capital expenditure, which this bid will resolve - and one of the potential for them to increase the volume of waste disposed of. There is mixed evidence on this latter issue. Bear in mind that bins were originally launched some 30 years ago when the idea of a doorstep recycling provision was only a glint in the eye of the most determined tree-hugger. Bins were designed to handle volumes of residual waste and nothing else. There is evidence that the larger bins encourage more waste to be put into them - but there is also a slight gain there, as there is also evidence that the amounts of rubbish taken to household waste sites declined as a result, so saving the carbon dioxide emissions of several cars making that trip. There is a degree of 'channel-shift' there, not just increased volume. 

Like many councils, Bristol initially issued the large 240 litre wheeled bins for residual waste (residual is the technical term for everything that isn't recycled - whatever you currently put into your black bags), but they have recently replaced them with smaller bins, to encourage residents to recycle more - something that early adopters of wheeled bins now recognise as a good move. When I appeared on BBC Radio WM, residents from other authorities were incredulous at the level of opposition from Birmingham residents to the very idea of wheeled bins and I'm convinced that if you come back in five or six years' time, nobody will be asking for a return to black bags.

A decade ago, the Health and Safety Executive produced a report on manual handling in waste collection, which came out quite clearly in favour of wheeled bins - although they do bring about new issues in terms of safe handling. Far too many of our bin crew members either leave service early through ill health or die soon after retirement - it is a tough and very physical job. Providing a bin will help prevent manual handling and sharps injuries, as well as helping to reduce the food for the rat population. Our people have a right to come to work in as safe an environment as we can make it - that isn't about being a health and safety fascist, it is about being human. When you have a worker off sick with stress for six months following a needle stick injury - to the point where his marriage broke up - don't we owe them the safest working environment possible?

In 2009, the Local Government Association, responding to a brief campaign by the Daily Mail, surveyed 28 local authorities to get a quick snapshot view and every one that responded said that introducing wheeled bins increased recycling. As Richard Kemp, then Liberal Democrat deputy chair of the LGA, said,

All the evidence shows that most people like their wheelie bins and think that they make it easier and cleaner to throw out the rubbish. People also find that wheelie bins help to reduce litter on the streets

Food waste was part of the initial proposal from the last administration, but once we actually got to bidding stage, the Department of Communities and Local Government's own advice indicated that a food waste collection was not a high priority for funding – indeed, a third of those applications failed to pass the Pickles test, including applications from Bolton and a £17 million bid from Leeds. Elsewhere, we have seen Nottinghamshire scrap their food waste collections because of costs, as did Pendle in 2011. Shropshire scrapped their separate collections - used to feed an anaerobic digester - back in 2010 in favour of a mixed green/food waste collection to supply in vessel composting. I still want us to explore food waste recycling, but it has to cost in and we need to build the platform that allows us to go down this path. There is no doubt at all that wheeled bins and increasing the capacity for mixed recyclates will improve our recycling rates faster and more sustainably than food waste. That has great potential, but advocates of food waste collections now miss the point that it needs huge investment in education and massive behavioural change to achieve the figures that they have suggested. 

The other practical issue is that a weekly food waste collection would actually remove the need for a weekly residuals (black bag) collection - indeed, if you look at the two year WRAP study on food waste collections, the collection model with the lowest drop off in participation is exactly that model. The graph to the left shows a clear bias towards alternate week collections - note how the red stars are higher and further to the right, indicating both higher participation rates and higher volumes per household for alternate week collections. On that basis alone, I'm very surprised that any food waste collection schemes were approved, but that may be a matter of having to spend the money to avoid losing face. The DCLG were also quite firm that they wanted to see some public support for food waste schemes - either through specific consultation or even just through a manifesto commitment. As we know, neither the Tories nor the Liberal Democrats had the imagination to come up with a manifesto prior to May 2012, so they didn't even try to get over that hurdle. From what little we know of their scheme, I think it would really have struggled to get the funding required and would certainly not have won almost £30 million from the government. If we were already at an alternate week collection model, then we might have succeeded, but it is hard to see the economic justification for bringing in food waste collections and maintaining a weekly residual waste round - I'm not aware of any bids that offered that as an option. The Tory/Lib Dem bid would have failed on value for money terms.  

We found out in scrutiny committee on Friday that Cllr Tim Huxtable (Con) had taken it upon himself to discuss with government ministers whether they would be open to us reopening the bid to discuss changes - to reinsert the food waste scheme, for example. If Cllr Huxtable has such good contacts within the DCLG, then I think we'd be much happier if he could talk to them about not leaving Birmingham in the lurch by ripping away funding from a city with serious and broad needs. But he'd prefer to use his time to talk rubbish. 

To quote from experience elsewhere:

“The introduction of the wheeled bin service was a massive improvement to the bag and box format we had before. We wanted to give residents the chance to be able to recycle more and make it as easy as possible for them and it has been a huge success so far. It wasn't a one size fits all solution as we recognised many properties in the city didn't have enough space... so... we've adapted... some properties can have smaller bins, or can stick with the bag and box collection service. Since the introduction of the wheeled bins, the city has constantly exceeded recycling targets set by the government.”

That is from a Liberal Democrat councillor in Liverpool – a city with a very similar spread of housing to Birmingham and one where the council successfully collect from 90% of properties. 

Even a former Birmingham Liberal Democrat councillor and cabinet member wrote in August that if we won this bid, Cllr McKay and the Labour administration (actually, he also included me, but I can't take any credit) would have

“brilliantly outmanoeuvred every single council in the country and will brilliantly grab £28.5 million from a £250 million pot.”

Which we did.

Other parties seem determined to stand in the way of saving money, improving our waste collection service and delaying further development. Along the way, they would condemn the poorest in our city to further cuts to services. These bins will save money, protect our workforce from sharp objects and heavy lifting, keep our streets cleaner and make our city greener. Of course there will be problems and difficulties along the way - any change will bring challenges, but we will solve them. It is what Birmingham does. 

I accept change is difficult for many people, but even in these most challenging of times, shouldn't we try to make our city a better place to live?

At the last council meeting, we were treated to a Liberal Democrat led attack on Labour's plan to bring wheeled bins to Birmingham. This piece is based on a speech I hoped to deliver, before we were timed out without even a chance for Cllr McKay to respond to the attacks from the combined opposition forces. I've also modified it following last week's call in by the Tories of Cabinet's acceptance of the Pickles money.

A wheelie good idea?

Martin Mullaney - recently rejected as a Lib Dem councillor by the good people of  Moseley and Kings Heath - claims to have got the details of a bid to the Department of Communities and Local Government from Birmingham City Council for a share of Pickles' Bin Giveaway and he's spinning it that every household in Birmingham will be forced to have three bins of particular sizes.

This is a partial view of a proposal about which more will be known during August and that partiality is a problem. Martin clearly hasn't had the full details, so he's scaremongering about what he thinks he knows. Wheeled bins are in there certainly, but that's not the full extent of the bid. There's a very good reason why we're not going into the details at this stage.

The fund only amounts to £250 million nationally - well below the £500 million estimated to reintroduce weekly collections across the country - and this pot is to be shared out amongst competitive bids. To this end, given that other large authorities are watching Birmingham closely, the details of it need to be kept confidential until the bid submission process closes in just over a fortnight. After that point, despite what Martin says, the City Council will consult on the details of the proposal with the people of Birmingham, in advance of any decision by the DCLG. Once Comrade Eric announces his decision, expected coincidentally around the time of the Tory conference in Birmingham, then the proposal will come back to Cabinet.

In the interests of the people that I represent, I have no wish to compromise Birmingham's bid for some extra money to improve our services, although Martin seems less reticent and has concluded - with only partial information at his disposal - that

There was an outline bid prepared by the previous administration, which had food waste collection at the centre. There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, the bid documents only mention food waste in conjunction with fortnightly collections (p8-9) - which Birmingham doesn't have.

"Set out the collection pattern(s) that the bid is proposing to commit to over the future (minimum) five year period, whether this is retaining or reinstating a weekly collection of residual household waste, adding a recycling element to a weekly residual collection, or adding a weekly food waste (or organic) collection to an existing fortnightly collection of weekly residual household waste." [emphasis added]

So already, the LibDem/Tory proposal was outside the parameters set by DCLG. That isn't to say it couldn't have been submitted, but we know that Eric Pickles is not a fan of adding further recycling containers and also that he will be taking a personal interest in these bids. You would reasonably expect that a bid from Birmingham - the largest local authority in the country - would receive attention from the Secretary of State and I would suggest that the bid as proposed by the last administration would not have succeeded.

Further, while the bid documentation does not require pre-bid consultation generally, according to the frequently asked questions document (p13),  proposals to introduce a food waste collection scheme would need to

"evidence “credible local support” where they plan to introduce a weekly food waste collection"

If the Liberal Democrats or Tories had bothered with a manifesto for the local elections that included a food waste collection - and had retained control - then that would have been sufficient for the purposes of the application. But neither did.

As it happens, I support food waste collection, but that has to go hand in hand with the infrastructure - probably an anaerobic digestion plant, given the size of Birmingham's expected volumes. Currently, we don't have that, so the waste would have to be transported elsewhere, reducing likely carbon savings and increasing costs. Incidentally, Martin holds up Somerset County Council as an example of what can be achieved - although he neglects to point out that the district councils in Somerset, who collect the 'residual' waste (stuff that isn't recycled) do so in wheelie bins.

We'll be able to discuss our plans in a fortnight or so, so watch out for more information then.