Axe the bin tax

Although ConservativeHome is worried about the Labour machine's use of the emails gained from the Downing Street petitions here is a special post from Blair Gibbs of The TaxPayers' Alliance:

"As reported in the Mail on Sunday, and with the support of that paper, the TaxPayers' Alliance has submitted our own Downing Street petition on the proposed bin tax, which is being introduced without consultation and by stealth.

Around 30 councils have started weighing household rubbish using microchips implanted in wheelie-bins. Government now advocates the nationwide application of this scheme whereby households will be charged for the amount of rubbish disposed. Schemes like this are already in place in Europe and if similar charges were introduced here, the average family could end up paying up to £120 per year, on top of council tax. Middle class families will be hit especially hard by this new tax

This new charge – like so much in public policy – will have unintended consequences.  The high cost will lead to more fly-tipping and backyard burning as people try to avoid the charge, which hardly advances the environmental cause. 

Ultimately, the TaxPayers' Alliance believes that this new tax cannot be justified given the 80% increase in council tax over the last decade and the enormous amount of waste at local government level.  Council taxes must be cut, but this new bin tax while purported to be for encouraging recycling, is in fact part of a green agenda that politicians are using merely as a new way to raise money. There are no plans to offset the charge with lower taxes elsewhere, nor are there any plans that homes that exceed recycling targets will be given a council tax discount. This is simply a tax on top of a tax.

Downing Street has just approved the petition and it is now live, so please click here and sign up, so we can start the ball rolling.  Please forward the link – http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AxetheBinTax/ - to other contacts you know.

Campaigning against green taxes is going to be a big theme for the TPA in 2007, and with the help of the Mail on Sunday, this petition may yet prove very popular.  Not least since this campaign issue ties in so well with general resentment already over local government waste and scandalously high council tax bills."

Comments

[Otis]

I have a lot of sympathy with the Taxpayers Allaince on most issues ... but not this one. As taxes go, this is one of the "less-bad". I would be happy to see pay-by-weight if it eased the pressure on Council Tax. This is surely fairer than me, producing one bag of rubbish a week, paying the same council tax as next door, who generate five?

Moving towards payment in proportion to the services used is fairer - it needn't be by stealth. Is it not the priniciple that the community charge was founded on? And don't tell me that many Conservatives don't think that the Poll Tax was fairer than what we have now!

[Phil Taylor]

The TPA is being wrong-headed to go after green taxes. They should go after waste. They should insist that green taxes displace other taxes but green taxes are going to be popular AS LONG AS THEY LEAD TO REDUCTIONS IN INCOME TAX IN PARTICULAR.

That said the bin tax is dumb on so many levels. It is already hard to get buy-in to council tax without hiving off one of the elements that keep most tax payers on board. If you really wanted to undermine council tax and the whole notion of property taxes then the bin tax is the way to go - I don't!

It will lead to fly-tipping and backyard incineration. It will lead to neighbour disputes. It will make the council tax look like a pure tax to pay for social services that the majority do not use and will undermine the tax base. It will open councils up to residents associations tendering out their rubbish collection to private contractors - the contractors exist why don't residents deal with them directly rather than letting their council intermediate and add costs? Doh!

[Valedictoryan]

I agree that the Law of Unintended Consequences will apply to a bin tax. It is not the way forward.

The most direct way to reduce waste is to reduce packaging and tax tat. If we are to have any new regulations or taxes, they should apply to the supply chain, not the consumer.

[Tam Large]

Bin tax is just a fly-tipper's charter - in any case we pay for rubbish removal already, through our Council Tax.

[Denis Cooper]

Completely the wrong approach. Householders don't deliberately generate waste - much of it is imposed upon them by suppliers. I'd favour a (hopefully voluntary) scheme whereby shops accepted back their packaging for recycling or in some cases reuse. Once upon a time empty bottles were taken back on the next trip to the off-licence or newsagent, and the deposits were taken off the cost of your purchases. Once upon a time the chemist asked you to bring back his medicine containers. All that finished with "one-trip" containers, which some of us said at the time was the wrong way to go. What's the problem with taking at least some of the empty containers and packaging back to the supermarket on the next trip, and letting them set up the systems to get the best value out of the materials?

[Richard]

If local councils are so damn keen on recyling then they should sift through our rubbish and do it. Better that than the highly unpopular once-every-two-weeks collections some of us have to put up with. Personally I'm quite happy to separate my rubbish but I don't see why my taste for recycling should be forced on anyone else via the threat of taxation.

[Michael McGowan]

Just another tax hike with the environment as the pretext. Plenty more of the same in the pipeline. Please can my council make it easier for local voters to recycle plastic bottles and waste food rather than having to send them to landfill. If it can be done in West London, surely it can be done in East Surrey too?

[Richard]

"Moving towards payment in proportion to the services used is fairer - it needn't be by stealth. Is it not the priniciple that the community charge was founded on?"

Unfortunately a lot of people didn't like the idea of having to pay for the services they were receiving. The poll tax was a fine idea in principle but it was implemented badly (making students pay it for example) and antagonised people who had got too used to not paying for local services. Plus the level at which it was set in a lot of areas was too high. Would be interesting to know how Wandsworth was able to achieve such a low rate.

[John Moss]

I don't agree.

One of the main problems with any local tax is the "little old lady in the big house" problem. i.e. Little old lady in house A, value X, pays the same as family with 2 or more wage earners in identical house. This is only slightly relieved by single person discount for Council Tax.

I favour local funds being raised from a variety of local sources and, in so far as is possible, that they are related to the use of a resident or business of a service or the income of the resident or business, not the value of their home.

A wheelie-bin with a chip in it with a weighing machine on the back of the bin lorry is an excellent step in the right direction!

[Rachel Joyce]

This tax is unfair for a number of reasons.
I live in a 4 person household. We don't use social care ever or health care very much at all. However, my children do create alot of rubbish!. We recycle absolutely everything that we can, and we compost everything compostable.
If we are going to be expected to pay more for our rubbish, then we should expect older people to pay more for social and health care, and people with children in private schools as well as households with no children not to pay for education. Where would it end?
I do think there may need to be some kind of penalty for those who consistently refuse to recycle (within complete reason, and even then I'm not completely convinced), but taxing your amount of rubbish is ridiculous. I also agree it would lead to fly-tipping, more bonfires with potentially toxic fumes etc.
Much more constructive would be to tax the supermarkets and manufacturers on the unnecessary packaging they produce. At Xmas, our bins were overflowing with packaging from children's toys - I would have delighted to buy the same without packaging, but the option is not available. Penalising this would significantly reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place.

[David Cooper]

I used to live in a flat on a private estate with a communal rubbish chute used by all eight flats in the block, with an eight foot high metal bin at the bottom that naturally needed a dustcart with a special lifting mechanism. Possibility of working out who had thrown what into it? Zero. Risk of arbitrary and unfair charging to anyone in the block generating only small quantities of rubbish, if the bin tax were to come in? High. Risk of aspiring fly tippers targeting the private estates' communal metal bins in the dead of night? Let's not go down that route. Just strangle this idea at birth.

[Matt Wright]

I think the problem with the way this Govt operates is that it will be a tax on top of another tax. Especially as councils are struggling with more duties yet no extra money and targets set from the top and not by local need. I suspect that many of the public will be angry at yet another tax and we as a party need to explain that we would cut taxes on those that partcipate in a community in order to reduce the costs to councils,

Matt

[Denis Cooper]

Packaging from children's toys may not be so easy, Rachel, because you may have got them from various retail outlets which you don't often visit. But most people do buy a lot of their stuff from a few supermarkets, and would be no great problem to take their packaging back to them on the next trip and drop it off on the way in. Then they could decide what they wanted to do with it - for example whether PET bottles for carbonated beverages could be re-used, or would have to be recycled. Whether it's on foot, by bicycle or by car, taking the empty plastic bottles back on the next visit to the supermarket would not usually be a big deal.

[Denis Cooper]

Richard @ 11:21 - surely you know that councils are not necessarily "damn keen on recycling", but they have to carry out their orders from the EU or be fined.

[George Hinton]

Just tried to use the link, but the No 10 web site takes ages to open and then falls over.

So, clearly the government has learnt a lesson from the road pricing petition to limit access and ensure that people get no chance to protest.

This is a tax on a tax and will create huge problems. To state that the continentals pay a bin tax is to forget that they do not pay thousands every year in council taxes.

This is NuLab finding ways to raise additional revenue from an overtaxed electorate.

The methodology has been to pass more responsibility onto local authorities and to introduce so-called eco-taxes/targets that the authorities have to meet, such as re-cycling, BUT, without making additional central precept monies available, thus forcing local authorities to raise more revenue, the only source, the resident.

One unforseen consequence of this project will see bins padlocked, preventing people from dumping their rubbish in some-one else's bin. So, will we see high street rubbish bins full of household rubbish?. That will then entail either their removal and our high streets looking like fly tips or the installation of CCTV to prevent their misuse.

Oh what a tangled web is being woven.

[Josh]

Charging by the kilo is actually a very good idea. Road pricing is also, in theory, a very good idea. The reason why road pricing is unacceptable though is the Big Brother aspect.

I don't really see the same problem with bin tax. Hence I am supportive of the theory.

However, as with road pricing we all know that we are not talking about shifting the tax pattern from the general council tax to the specific bin tax. Instead, we are talking about adding to the already existing burden because Labour and Lib Dem councils are too stupid to be able to control their spending.

[Denis Cooper]

Petition: "compel shops and supermarkets to accept packaging for disposal."

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Packaging/

"Currently, a third of waste consists of packaging. Recycling is all very well,
but it is far better not to create the unnecessary material in the first place.
Please compel supermarkets to provide spaces, bins and personnel to assist
in the immediate disposal of any unwanted packaging on their own premises."

They should have said "immediate or subsequent disposal of packaging".

[Josh]

"Currently, a third of waste consists of packaging. Recycling is all very well,
but it is far better not to create the unnecessary material in the first place.
Please compel supermarkets to provide spaces, bins and personnel to assist
in the immediate disposal of any unwanted packaging on their own premises."

Isn't that really just redistribution of packaging?

[Denis Cooper]

Of course, but not through the local council system at the expense of the local taxpayer, not mixed up with other stuff, and potentially some of it could be sent back along the supply chain for re-use. I wonder if any supermarket chain will be the first to show its green credentials by providing in-store bins for the recycling of its various forms of packaging.

[Ashton]

A green tax should be one that charges those who make unnecessary waste which damages the environment. Charging people for the weight of their bins is not a correct method. Even if everybody recycled everything that was recyclable, there will still be necessary waste that cannot be recycled. That is an unjust, unfair, ungreen tax, which will only result in underhand waste disposal and bad blood between neighbours.

[Jack Stone]

I am in favour of green taxes but I think we are not getting over the major differance between us and Labour and the Lib/Dems on this. That is that where they see these as taxes as additional taxation we see it as neutral and part of a process of shifting taxes so that those who pollute the most and create the most waste pay the most.

[Derek Buxton]

Stupidity comes easy. We pay Council Tax for the services they provide, one of which is rubbish collection. To then make an extra charge is fraud, end of story. As for recycling, what a laugh, it is an EU scam to suit the likes of Holland and their friends. We do not have the incinerator capacity to handle all the waste, the cost of setting this up would be enormous. To take packaging back to the supplier would just increase prices. Remember the system designed to burn cardboard in a power station, in Scotland I think, scrapped because of a stupid DEfRA ruling. I already pay over 11% of my income to the Council, and this year it will go up again. Let's see what was Cameron banging on about ...social justice! That alone damns him.

[Derek Buxton]

Stupidity comes easy. We pay Council Tax for the services they provide, one of which is rubbish collection. To then make an extra charge is fraud, end of story. As for recycling, what a laugh, it is an EU scam to suit the likes of Holland and their friends. We do not have the incinerator capacity to handle all the waste, the cost of setting this up would be enormous. To take packaging back to the supplier would just increase prices. Remember the system designed to burn cardboard in a power station, in Scotland I think, scrapped because of a stupid DEfRA ruling. I already pay over 11% of my income to the Council, and this year it will go up again. Let's see what was Cameron banging on about ...social justice! That alone damns him.

[Jon White]

If we're really serious about recycling, here's an idea:

In the state of Connecticut, supermarkets (and indeed all retailers) charge a 5 cents premium on all drink cans and bottles. They also all have recycling areas where you can take the empties and get your 5 cents back. (in the form of a voucher that you must spend in their shop, of course).

The retailers love it, of course - even if 100% are taken back their cash flow is still helped, and of course 100% aren't taken back.

It helps litter - people literally go out looking for cans and bottles that they can take to the recycling centres.

It reduces 'rubbish'. People do not put bottles and cans in their rubbish (trash) for collection.

It makes people more green. The financial incentive is a good one - most people do re-cycle.

And we don't have to have a bin tax for a service that we already pay through the nose for. (and this is from someone in a so called Conservative Council - Redbridge - who are in reality nothing but tax and spend socialists).

[Bedd Gelert]

I am not a natural right-wingers, and have an inbuilt sympathy for green issues. However this is simply not going to work effectively.

Bristol isn't charging a 'bin tax' but has cut collections to fortnightly with the laudable aim of increasing use of 'recycling' bins.

But the impact in terms of increased fly-tip rubbish has been huge - things just get thrown in the river, or on the banks. Or people just stuff their neighbours wheelie bins, usually with their consent, but often without asking.

Problems like these will increase with the 'bin tax'. Something does need to be done to reduce rubbish and increase recycling - but closer to the production end. If things are wrapped up in huge amounts of non-degradable plastic, then it is going to end up in land fill sooner or later, whatever 'bin tax' is applied.

This is just tackling the symptom, and not really addressing the problem.

[Adam]

I wonder why the Europeans (who nearly all have versions of a bin tax) don't have problems with fly-tipping...