Guess who pays more to collect Chester bins?

8:50am Thursday 14th August 2008

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RESIDENTS in Vale Royal will pay for householders in Chester to keep their weekly rubbish collections.

Chester residents have chosen to maintain a £500,000 a year weekly collection for at least three years from when new council Cheshire West and Chester (CWAC) takes over in April next year.

Council Tax payers from Vale Royal and Ellesmere Port and Neston, which run cheaper fortnightly collections, are helping to foot the bill.

Clr Malcolm Gaskill, mayor of Vale Royal and Liberal Democrat group leader on CWAC shadow council, said: “Chester residents are now going to have a weekly collection which will be more expensive – several hundred thousand pounds a year more.

“We’re going to be subsidising this and it could be quite costly for the tax payers of Cheshire west.”

Chester City Council is signing a seven-year weekly recyclable and waste collection contract with Focsa UK to start in April, although this has a break clause in it after three years when Vale Royal and Ellesmere Port and Neston’s waste contracts will also be ready for review.

Clr Gaskill is concerned that, despite phenomenally successful recycling rates of 48 per cent in Vale Royal and 45 per cent in Ellesmere Port and Neston, Chester councillors will push for all areas in CWAC to have weekly collections from 2012.

Chester City Council’s recycling rate is 38 per cent.

He said: “Everyone would like waste collected weekly if we could afford it and if it would keep recycling up, which of course it won’t – of the top 30 recyclers, 28 are on alternate weekly collection schemes.

“A few people would say weekly is wonderful but watch the recycling rates drop by 10 to 15 per cent and then we’ll be paying massive penalties.

“It would be such a retrograde step.”

Clr Mike Jones, leader of CWAC shadow council, explained that hundreds of services would be run in three different ways after the areas merge next year.

He said it will take a few years for all policies to be aligned and that consultation with residents will be the key, especially in rubbish and recycling.

“Every waste collection option will be on the table in 2012,” he said.

“We’ll measure the three different ways of doing it and look at the best performance for the best cost.

“We’ll do a proper consultation like we did in Chester saying ‘these are the different options and costs, what do you want?’ “Weekly is more expensive but 70 per cent of the 8,000 respondents in Chester said ‘we want a weekly collection even though it’s going to cost a bit more’.

“We’re about listening to what people want us to do and if we can’t do it we’ll explain why.”