Pickles in a pickle

Good old Calamity Pickles has been at it again. Last Thursday saw him barking more threats at councils, prophesying outrage by an "angry middle England" if councils didn't revert to weekly waste collections.

If he's talking about waste you can bet your bin he's talking rubbish - but he might have good reasons for not letting that bother him.

Currently it's simply not the case that most people, or even many people, are angry about their waste collections. WRAP - the taxpayer funded, and impartial, Government advisor on all things waste - found that more than 80% of the public are satisfied with their waste and recycling collection.

Nor, so long as councils collect food waste weekly, is it the case that alternate weekly collections (AWCs) of black bag waste are unhygienic as Pickles claims. AWCs boost recycling at the same time as saving councils hundreds of thousands of pounds each. Mr Pickles needn't just take that from me - I watched an angry councillor from his own party make precisely that point to him at the Conservative Party Conference last October.

That's precious money desperately needed for other threatened council services -  libraries, old people's homes, children's centres and so on.

So why does Mr Pickles keep saying it?

The less cynical part of me puts it down to a belief in individual rights and freedom. Mr Pickles thinks that you should have the right, as a council tax payer,  to weekly rubbish collections. Or, to put it another way, freedom from having to recycle. But this argument doesn't quite stand up. Weekly rubbish collections cost more - because you're sending trucks out twice as often to collect half empty bins, and because they mean people recycle less and instead generate more black bag rubbish that the council then has to pay huge landfill or incineration fees to dispose of. One estimate of the damage from forcing all councils to revert to weekly rubbish collections is that it would cost councils £530million over four years and knock our recycling rate back by more than 5%.

Since most people are enthusiastic recyclers who don't need or even want weekly collections, forcing councils back to weekly collections means a central Government minority is removing the ability of elected councillors to spend money on what the majority want them to spend it on. Including, incidentally, decent waste and recycling services. Where's the freedom in that?

 And the more cynical side of me? Mr Pickles is a cunning enough politician to realise that if he tells people often enough they are angry with their councils, then there's a good chance they'll become angry with their councils.

 Once that happens, guess who'll get the blame for all those cut services?