We would like to take this opportunity to explain our decision to introduce a charge for the collection of garden waste.  We know, from talking to people on the doorstep, that many of you don’t like having to pay for this service and want to understand why we have taken this decision. 

This is not a decision we have taken lightly – and we don’t like having to do it.  This year we have had to find £4 million of savings out of an £18 million budget.   This is quite a significant proportion of our budget and is largely due to a reduced government grant caused by the record budget deficit left by the last Labour Government.  The green waste charge is only one small part of the savings we have had to achieve.  We will probably be losing around 75 posts, out of a full-time equivalent staff of 400.  We have recently reduced the number of Council Directors from 4 to 3 and this slimming down will continue throughout the organisation.

Some people have asked us why we have frozen council tax and yet charged for the garden waste service.  First of all, the Government has rewarded councils who have frozen the Council Tax with extra grant – so if we had increased the council tax we would have lost this money, making our financial position even worse.  Because the City Council’s share of the council tax is so small, the increase which would have been needed to avoid having to introduce a charge would have been larger than the Government would allow.  Finally, some people who don’t use this service (people who live in flats or houses without gardens, or who choose to home compost or take their garden waste to the Household Recycling Centre at Hempsted) feel it wouldn’t be right for them to subsidise people who do choose to use it.

The alternative to introducing the charge was to discontinue the service altogether.  When we carried out our budget consultation, most people told us they would prefer to pay a modest charge rather than lose the service altogether.  Over 10,000 households have already signed up – showing that people do value it.

We have been quite unusual as a local authority in not charging for this service until now (Tewkesbury, for example, has done for years) and unfortunately to continue to do so is not something we can sustain.  Some authorities, such as Stroud, choose not to provide this service at all.

Even the opposition Liberal Democrat Group on the Council did not oppose the introduction of the charge as they recognised the difficult decisions we have had to take to balance the budget. 

We do appreciate that this is difficult and it adds to the already mounting pressures on everyone’s budget, but we hope you understand why we have had to take this step.

Cllrs Paul James and Steve Morgan

Leader of the City Council & Cabinet Member for Environment, respectively.