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by Paul Scully | Jul 4, 2008 | News |
The row surrounding the unpopular £35 green garden waste charge rumbles on with the next stage predicted by the Conservatives back when the charge was first approved. Almost one case of flytipping a day has been reported to the Council as a result of this charge.
Cllr Tony Shields spent forty minutes on a whistlestop tour of the Borough and spotted a further ten cases where the old plastic bags had been left on verges and along streets. This is despite the new scheme having been in place for a month. Tony told the Sutton Guardian
“You don’t have to be Sir Alan Sugar to work out this scheme just isn’t working. Since the plan was introduced, there’s been 20 reported instances of garden waste being fly-tipped. Just driving round Sutton for 40 minutes showed me that there are plenty more bags being dumped.
“It demonstrates the hacked-off public’s refusal to pay £35 per bag and an unwillingness to queue outside the Kimpton dump in the sweltering heat for nearly an hour – neither of which I would call fun. This is a total Lib Dem cock-up and the taxpayer is funding the cost of fly-tip collection.”
Shadow Waste Spokesman John Kennedy added,
“There’s obviously going to be a large cost involved if the council diligently picks up all the flytipped waste. Who knows whether or not they have the necessary fleet get it all done. The carbon footprint impact will be huge, not to mention the time it takes to pick it all up.”
He said Liberal Democrat councillors only had themselves to blame. “We warned them from the outset that this would happen. In the warm weather, not only is fly tipping an environmental hazard, it’s also unsightly.”
LibDem spokesman Colin Hall has dismissed the charge saying that Sutton has one of the lowest rates of flytipping and that garden waste made up 5% of all flytipped waste in June. A back of an envelope calculation would suggest that according to his figures there were 100 incidents in a single month of illegally dumped waste. If this is right, it can’t be dismissed that easily. What is he doing to address this costly and unsightly problem?
I am glad that he has finally relented and decided to consult residents six months after introducing the policy. Not so much Consult, Consider, Ignore but Ignore, Consider, Consult. Residents that are against the charge need to make their voices heard clearly in this period.
![Reaching The Fly-Tipping Point]()
by Paul Scully | Jul 4, 2008 | News |
![Reaching The Fly-Tipping Point]()
by Paul Scully | Jun 30, 2008 | News |
There have been many column inches written in the papers this weekend about Gordon Brown, marking his first year clinging to power. His predicament was captured best by Anthony King in the Telegraph who said, “A year ago, YouGov’s surveys for The Telegraph suggested that most voters believed that, even if Gordon Brown could not walk on water, at least he was a vigorous swimmer. Now they are convinced he is a drowning man.”
This is beyond the usual Westminster Village tittle-tattle. Every day, Gordon Brown and his Cabinet are fire-fighting comments and articles that he simply isn’t up to the job. The claim that he was just “getting on with the job,” is appearing thinner and thinner. He has gone past the point where John Major could offer him empathy, after coming fifth in Henley behind the Green Party and BNP, just beating UKIP. The Labour candidate even lost his deposit.
Politically, I want him to stay on the grounds that he is considered an electoral liability by two thirds of the population, but on humanitarian grounds, doesn’t anyone in the Labour Party have the courage and wherewithal to put him out of his misery so that Government can start to function again in these difficult times?
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by Paul Scully | Jun 30, 2008 | News |
Several newspapers including The Times reported today that pupils are receiving marks in their GCSE English exams for writing swear words on their papers. One pupil who simply wrote f*** off as an answer received 2 marks out of a maximum 27 (7.5%) for accurate spelling and conveying the meaning of a word. Amazingly, Peter Buckroyd, chief examiner at the the largest examination board AQA, explained that he would have given more marks if the pupil had added an exclamation mark. He said “It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.
“It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.”
Where to start? This is the same exam board with whom you can gain a grade C pass in Maths with a mere 20%. Mr Buckroyd is certainly consistent in his views. He should have realised that after this incredible revelation, it would have been better to say nothing at all. Just how many children does Mr Buckroyd want to fail before he presides over an exam that stretches children sufficiently to prepare them for a world beyond cheap cider and a lifetime’s dependency on the welfare state.
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by Paul Scully | Jun 26, 2008 | News |
On Tuesday night I sat on the Scrutiny & Overview Committee that looked at a proposal to bring emissions-based parking charges to Sutton. I wrote about this when Richmond introduced a similar scheme in 2006. Fortunately after more than two hours, the committee saw sense and killed off any thoughts about such a plan.
It has been calculated that 1.69% of Richmond’s total CO2 emissions come from cars with a parking permit yet they are unduly penalised. Here, residents in Cheam, Belmont, St Helier and Wallington could pollute as much as they wanted to. Similarly anyone in a controlled parking zone with off-street parking would not be affected. Amazingly, as the controlled hours are during the day, anyone who drives their car to work every day would be free to do so with no penalty as they would not need a permit. The only ones who would have to pay would be people whose cars were parked up, not emitting a single cough of CO2. A back of the envelope calculation showed that only 3.5% of cars in Sutton would have to pay this cost on the back of everyone’s pollution.
Everyone at the committee takes the responsibility of reducing emissions seriously but this smacked of doing something because we need to be seen to act rather than an effective move. We were not allowed to question Colin Hall, the Lead Councillor who commissioned the report. Members of the committee were perplexed when Cllr Roger Roberts, the chairman of the committee took it upon himself to explain to officers what the recommendation of the committee should be without letting members have their say. Despite widespread antipathy to the fundamental idea of such charging, he proposed that the Council Officer went away and spent more time redrafting the report. Fortunately, he was slapped down as was the report.
It wasn’t quite the end of the fun as the Chairman managed to push through two discussion papers without allowing any discussion. The Council is undergoing a corporate assessment at the moment which is much like an OFSTED inspection in a school when assessors look at absolutely everything and appear everywhere. The chief assessor sat in on this meeting. We are currently a four star rated Council. Last night I could see one of those stars tiptoeing its way to the door.
The row surrounding the unpopular £35 green garden waste charge rumbles on with the next stage predicted by the Conservatives back when the charge was first approved. Almost one case of flytipping a day has been reported to the Council as a result of this charge.
