Tendring Topics.....on line
Taking a
Sledgehammer (if not a Pile-driver!) to crack a nut!
Last
week, a headline of the local Daily Gazette
read ‘Use too many black bags and you risk a visit from the recycling
snoopers’.
In
fact there’s no such risk just yet, but the Gazette
reports that, ‘From early next year,
waste collectors in Colchester will begin
using a new hi-tech computer system to log how much waste is left out for
them. Householders repeatedly caught
leaving out too much trash in black sacks will get a visit from council wardens
to ‘educate’ them on recycling. Those
wardens will go through the household’s black sacks and explain which items
could be recycled instead of going into landfill.
‘The hope is’, Matthew
Young, Head of Waste Services, says, ‘that
we educate people and, collectively, the amount of waste going to landfill is
cut massively’.
I applaud
Colchester Council’s aims but I can’t help feeling that they could have
achieved their objectives much more easily without all the hi-tech computer
activities, without having to rummage through other people’s refuse, and
without kindergarten style lessons to householders on what can and cannot be
recycled. All of that seems to me like
using the latest third-millennium technology plus the techniques of a seedy
‘private eye’ to teach grandmothers how to suck eggs!
I
don’t suppose that the residents of Colchester Borough are markedly different
from those of our own neighbouring Tendring District and, in particular, my own
town of Clacton-on-Sea . Driving, cycling or, in my case,
mobility-scootering round Clacton ’s
residential streets on refuse and salvage collection day will reveal a number
of households where the Council’s requirements are fulfilled to the
letter. On the boundary of the property
will be a black sack containing non-recyclable land-fill waste and a smallish
green plastic box with food waste for recycling. These are collected
weekly. There will also be either a
larger green plastic box containing plastic bottles and metal food cans, or a
red box containing cardboard and paper waste.
These are collected on alternate weeks. Each householder has been
supplied with a chart showing which box is to be put out on each particular
week.
There
will be a number of properties where there isn’t a red or a green box,
either large or small, in sight. There
will though be up to as many as half a dozen filled black plastic bags put out
for collection for landfill. These are
the homes of those who don’t co-operate with the council’s scheme, have never
done so, and probably have no intention of ever doing so. It doesn’t take hi-tech equipment to discover
them and there really is no point in opening any of those back plastic bags and
pointing out which items could have
been put out for recycling. The vast
majority of non-co-operating householders know perfectly well what can and what
cannot be recycled. They simply won’t,
or perhaps can’t, sort them out, put them in the appropriate box and take them
to the boundary of their property on collection day. It’s far simpler and easier just to put
everything in black plastic bags. If the council supplies only one bag for each
week, they can buy some more from the nearest supermarket. They’re not expensive.
An
official should call on each one of those householders and find out why they are not co-operating with the
council’s salvage collection scheme.
Some may have a perfectly valid reason.
Sorting out what is salvageable and what isn’t, putting it into the
appropriate container and taking the correct filled containers to the property
boundary each week will be beyond the capabilities of many elderly or frail
people – and our Essex
Sunshine Coast
Others
may find that holding down a job, looking after a home and perhaps bringing up
several children, leaves them with neither the time nor the energy to undertake
an extra task. Sorting out the refuse
and salvage and taking it to the property boundary would, in their case, be the
final straw that would break the camel’s back!
The Council may be able to help some of them by, for instance, arranging
for the refuse to be collected from outside the back door instead of the front
gate.
It
is those who could co-operate but
choose not to on whom local councils should concentrate their efforts, first by
persuasion and, if that fails, by rewarding those who co-operate and penalising
the others. Now that, despite talk about empowering local communities,
local authorities have become little more than agents of central government, their ability either ‘to wield the stick
or offer the carrot’ is probably extremely limited. Nevertheless, that path – rather than by the
hi-tech plus patronising educational efforts being attempted in Colchester – is the only one that can hope to bring the
proportion of recyclables to that of land-fill to an acceptable level.
Another ‘Time Traveller’ finds himself
in trouble!
I
sometimes feel that I am a kind of Time
Traveller, a cheap ‘economy version’ of Dr. Who. I am a mid-twentieth century man, with
mid-twentieth century attitudes and a mid-twentieth century vocabulary, who
finds himself in the twenty-first century and sometimes gets into trouble as a
result. As L.P. Hartley says in the
first sentence of his novel The Go-Between,
‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’.
It seems that I am
not alone. Tendring Councillor Michael Talbot, the respected leader of the
Independent Group on Tendring District Council (although I think several
decades younger than me) appears to be a fellow time-traveller. He has got
himself into serious trouble by using a phrase that was common enough in the
time of my youth, and presumably in his, but is totally taboo in 2012
In a public
meeting Mr Talbot used the phrase ‘the
n……….in the woodpile’ and thus provoked shock and horror among his fellow
councillors and some council officials.
He realized at once that what he had said was unacceptable and
apologised to the Meeting, saying ‘It’s
an old-fashioned term and I put it down to my age that I used it at all. I understand that it has caused offence and
apologise to all members of the Council for this slip on my part’.
The Daily Gazette explains that the
offensive phrase was a figure of speech meaning, ‘a fact of importance that is not disclosed’. It in fact a phrase that had its origins in
the USA
and has the wider meaning of an unexpected and usually unpleasant surprise
concealed among otherwise harmless or beneficial material. It is similar in
meaning to ‘the fly in the ointment’ or
‘the spanner in the works’. I can
well understand that it is a phrase that would cause deep offence to black
people, but in the 1920s and ‘30s many of us had never met or even seen a black
person (I never had until I joined the army) so we used the phrase casually,
totally unaware of its offensive and hurtful potential.
Following his
immediate verbal apology Mr Talbot sent an email to his fellow-councillors
apologising even more profusely for having used ‘what is a quite unacceptable expression regarded as being racist, in
the conduct of a public meeting’.
It seems that
these apologies were not really enough for Council Leader Neil Stock who had
chaired the Meeting. Calling for Mr
Talbot to resign his leadership of the Independent Group he declared that the
use of the phrase had left him ‘genuinely
stunned’ and said that after the Meeting a Senior Council Officer had
remarked that if Tendring had been a London Borough the use of the phrase ‘would not simply have been a matter for the
conduct committee, it would have resulted in a full-scale police
investigation’. If that is so then we certainly do need Commissioners to
make sure that Police get their priorities right! It seems that, as in my
day, there are always a few officials eager to tell influential councillors
what they think they would like to hear!
I suppose that
Mr Stock’s professed shock and horror couldn’t have had anything to do with Mr
Talbot’s earlier criticism of the oafish behaviour of the council’s finance
supremo Councillor Peter Halliday whom Neil Stock is supporting as Council
Leader when he leaves that post shortly?
‘In
days of old, when knights were bold……
The
bad, bold barons of those days could – and did – get away with murder! Things are different now but one local life-baron
does seem to have got away very lightly with some pretty reprehensible
activities.
I
have been strongly critical of Lord Hanningfield ever since I started to write Tendring Topics….on line, four years
ago. He was then political leader of the
Essex County Council. I thought that he
was pompous, self-important, publicity seeking, always ready to accept
graciously any praise accorded to the county council, while hurriedly passing
on to someone else any criticism of any of its services, such as – for instance
– its failing child protection service. He was always floating brilliant
ground-breaking ideas that made headlines in the press but were either wildly
expensive, ineffective or unwanted.
There
was the wonderful Essex Bank, for instance, that was going to offer quick and
easy finance to Essex businesses. It turned out to be less helpful than the
ordinary commercial banks and was clearly unwanted. There was the Essex County Council branch
office in mainland China
that was going to bring vast export orders to Essex
firms. Whatever happened to that, I
wonder? There was the ‘Essex jobs for Essex
men and women’ campaign, urging potential employers to employ local staff. That was followed by the Essex County
Council, at Lord Hanningfield’s initiative, outsourcing its IT services to an
international enterprise. Its HQ was not only not in Essex but not in the UK! Members of The County Council’s existing IT
staff lost their jobs. Then there was the conference he called of other highway
authorities (Essex leads the way!) on
combating the effects of hard winters. The following winter Essex was the very first highway authority to run out of grit and salt!
It
was obvious to me too, that he had a taste for international travel at the
tax-payers’ expense. There was an event
in Harwich , Massachusetts China (for the
Olympics!), Hong Kong , India , and the West Indies . All of course were at our expense.
All
this time Lord Hanningfield was attending the House of Lords as a member, and
it was in this capacity that Nemesis caught up with him! In May, 2011 he was prosecuted and found
guilty of fiddling his House of Lords expenses to the extent of £14,000 (it was
subsequently discovered to be much more than that!) and was sentenced to nine
months in gaol. It was a light sentence
and for reasons that have never been made clear, he served only a small part of
it. Shortly after discharge he was
re-arrested on suspicion of fiddling his County Council expenses too and
released under police bail. Just last
week we learned that no further action was to be taken by the police because of
‘lack of evidence’. This did mean that
all the evidence supplied by Essex County Council was returned to them. They promptly published details of purchases
made on Lord Hanningdale’s corporate credit card, and paid for by the county
council, during the last five years of his Lordship’s nine year reign as Leader
of the County Council.
During
those five years he spent £286,938 on that credit card – on flights round the
world, on luxury hotels and on hospitality in the House of Lords and elsewhere.
It was also revealed that the County Council employs three chauffeurs working
up to 97 hours a week. They were often
employed to convey the peer to and from his home to the House of Lords! There was, it appears, no firm policy on the
proper use of the chauffeurs and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work
out which travel expenses were allowable – and which were not.
Lord
Hanningfield was not the only guilty
one. Senior officers and
fellow-councillors must certainly have known of his profligacy – and done
nothing about it. Others took advantage
of his generous hospitality (at our expense!).
They must surely bear a share of the guilt.
I’m
not surprised that the present leader of the County Council now wants closure
on the past and concentration on the present and future!
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