Fresh criticism of Darlington wheelie-bin scheme

8:00am Saturday 29th September 2012 in News Photograph of the Author By Steven Hugill

COUNCILLORS have been accused of “putting the cart before the horse” over a controversial decision to introduce wheelie bins in Darlington.

Darlington Borough Council have purchased thousands of new bins to replace current black bag collections, with the scheme set to be rolled out in June next year.

The plan has courted criticism from councillors, who highlighted concerns at a full council meeting about the cost of the 240-litre and 140-litre bins, and the practicality of wagons accessing small alleyways to collect rubbish.

However, Councillor Nick Wallis, cabinet member for leisure and local environment, said resenting councillors were “playing politics” on the proposals, which could jeopardise the scheme, and called on members to speak to residents and identify suitable collection routes.

Coun Alan Macnab, ward member for North Road, said the authority had been short-sighted with its decision.

He said: “This seems to be a cart before the horse situation, the council has gone out and ordered the bins and now they are seeing if there are any problems.

“There are massive issues in North Road and the new bin wagon will not be able to get down the back alleys.

“Where are the people in terraced houses going to put their bins if they have no gardens?

“You should really have looked at the system first to see if we needed the bins or could stay with the black bags.”

Coun Charles Johnson, who represents Hummersknott ward, said the cost of the bins could have been absorbed into other services.

He said: “The bins really don’t change anything, there isn’t a great problem with the black bags and this money could have been spent on things like getting grass cut.”

However, Coun Wallis, said councillors’ resistance could potentially backfire on residents.

He said: “Some members might want to play politics but if they do, they will be letting the people in their wards down.

“The bins are tried and tested and we now have to get the right routes for collection and councillors must consult with residents.

“I don’t want anyone coming back next year saying they have not been listened to.”

Comments(30)

Madadrian says...
9:29am Sat 29 Sep 12

Something more to clutter up the back lanes. Is there any real difference between putting a black bag out or putting it in a bin left in the back lane by the council except expense to the taxpayer?

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tabby67 says...
11:08am Sat 29 Sep 12

We are so far behind the times everywhere else has them I cant see what the problem is. I want a garden waste one as well!! My friends live elsewhere and have 4 bins there has to be an initial outlay everybody needs to stop moaning and just get on with it!

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Catherinet says...
2:32pm Sat 29 Sep 12

Here here tabby67. The rest of civilisation has them. Get with the times old grumbling **** of Darlo!

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Catherinet says...
2:33pm Sat 29 Sep 12

By the way that wasn't a swear word it starred lol

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harry2 says...
6:48pm Sat 29 Sep 12

Every other town has back alleys and they all cope

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oliviaden6 says...
8:20pm Sat 29 Sep 12

This is the thin edge of the wedge!
ONCE these things come into use the council will start bringing bylawsnin about the lids have to be closed if you put a back along side a FULL bin you as the house holder WILL incur the wrath of the borough and also the wrath of the Refuse collection teams. They will fine you and leave the rubbish to pile up and fine you more, PREPARED to have MANY MORE trips to JOHN WADE REFUSE SITES

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Spy Boy says...
8:43pm Sat 29 Sep 12

Let's have a reforendum. That's fair. Wheelie bins may be very useful to some people that have the space to keep them, but a lot of people don't. The streets are going to be clogged with them. Some alleys are not wide enough for the truck and the bins, so are they going to be put outside front doors ? Has anyone on the council actually taken a tape measure to find out the problems ? I doubt it. They really are incompetent. They only look their own rewards and **** the rest of us. I'm sick of the bunch of clowns.

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Lifetime Townie says...
8:54pm Sat 29 Sep 12

We don't need them for any reason. If anyone is playing at politics it's Councillor Wallis who is desperately trying to justify the need for the wheelie bins so that he can spend the increase in council tax. We can't afford them and HSE say that they are not compulsory so why have them???? After he was voted in it Is now difficult to believe that Councilor Wallis is acting for the benefit of the Darlo residents OR what else??.

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Madadrian says...
11:05am Sun 30 Sep 12

I take it harry2 doesn't live in a terraced house where space is limited.

I wonder what these auocrats will do to those who just leave the bins where the council dumps them. After all they are not our bins. They belong to Darlington local authority not the householders

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Lifetime Townie says...
11:16am Sun 30 Sep 12

Can we sue the council if we receive injury while we are handling the council owned bins? What do the accident lawyers say to this?

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Alan Macnab says...
12:22pm Sun 30 Sep 12

The curious thing was when I raised the very real concerns of residents about wheelie bins in Council on Thursday evening I was accused of playing politics and the concerns were not addressed. The Labour Group are steamrolling this through because they have a majority on the Council. It is profoundly undemocratic not to consult residents on this when it was first mooted by the officers. Basically there is no case for wheelie bins and Darlington cannot afford them at this time.

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harry2 says...
9:10pm Sun 30 Sep 12

Actually I do live in a terraced house and I was simply pointing out a fact that all towns have terraced houses and they cope.

I'm not against wheelie bins but only if it is done properly and fairly, they have wheelie bins in Sheffield where my sister lives and she has three bins 1 for rubbish, and 2 for recycling they make it work for them I have found our recycling services atrocious to say the least .

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harry2 says...
9:10pm Sun 30 Sep 12

Actually I do live in a terraced house and I was simply pointing out a fact that all towns have terraced houses and they cope.

I'm not against wheelie bins but only if it is done properly and fairly, they have wheelie bins in Sheffield where my sister lives and she has three bins 1 for rubbish, and 2 for recycling they make it work for them I have found our recycling services atrocious to say the least .

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Madadrian says...
9:36am Mon 1 Oct 12

Harry2
I quite agree the recycling facilitieas are atrocious. I know now of only two recycling sites at shopping centres. One at Cockerton and one at Asda. The one we had at Gladstone street carpark has vanished even though there is still a signpost pointing to it. And the out of town recycling facilities need a car. Hardly cost effective to dump a few bottles and a bag of junk mail.

But the wheel bins are no use to those in terraced houses with back lanes. The bins are council property and will be left in the lanes where they will be set on fire, vandalised and thrown about the streets. An enormous expense for no gain when the system we have at the moment works well.

I could consider the introduction of communal bins like those I have seen in other towns where 5 or 6 homes share one large skip type bin. The system is used in other countries and with the bins parked at kerbsides they are less prone to vandalism and easier to access by the refuse wagon than the ones that will be dumped in the back lanes.

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Quaker Boy says...
9:43am Mon 1 Oct 12

I am at a loss as to why all this money is being spent on wheelie bins when a) the Council is making all these cut backs and b) there is not just the town's assets that require money spending on them but also the road network. For example and there are many more, Hollyhurst Road and the road past the Civic Theatre are atrocious to drive on and don't get me started on the ring road, what a nightmare.

So if there is money readily available then this useless Council should be spending it on much more important projects than something that is not needed or wanted.

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miketually says...
11:00am Mon 1 Oct 12

Is a possible solution for wheelie bins in terraced streets to create communal bin parks on the street by building on a small portion of the road?

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spoorsjone says...
1:50pm Mon 1 Oct 12

I must have a trip round Darlington , i've never read so many crackpot comments on such a simple thing as the introduction of wheelie -bins.What do you do when a real problem comes along?

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Madadrian says...
2:39pm Mon 1 Oct 12

spoorsjone

Well if a real problem comes along we will all have to urinate and defecate on the steps of the civic centre seeing as how all the money that could have kept public toilets in the market open and a bit more besides is going to be wasted on wheel bins that many neither desire or need

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Homshaw1 says...
4:07pm Mon 1 Oct 12

Lifetime Townie wrote:
We don't need them for any reason. If anyone is playing at politics it's Councillor Wallis who is desperately trying to justify the need for the wheelie bins so that he can spend the increase in council tax. We can't afford them and HSE say that they are not compulsory so why have them???? After he was voted in it Is now difficult to believe that Councilor Wallis is acting for the benefit of the Darlo residents OR what else??.
There was a discussion on this site a little while back following a statement by Mr Wallis that the subject was not open to consultation. The reason given was that it was a H & S requirement and not negotiable.

These councillors treat people like idiots.You do not know what to believe.

I have no objection to wheelie bins but there has got to be more important things to spend money on at this point in time.

This quality of this council is desparately poor.

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spoorsjone says...
4:17pm Mon 1 Oct 12

but just about everybody has wheelie bins except you, there is no problem with wheelie bins they are conveinient and easy to use, much better than plastic bags ,as for the exspence you don't get anything for free, yes there is lots of things the council could be buying for town but you can;t deal with everything in one tax year.

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Lifetime Townie says...
4:40pm Mon 1 Oct 12

A letter from HSE says that in general wheelie bins should be used in preference to bins bag but it does not say that wheelie bins are compulsory in fact it infers quite the opposite. So there was a choice to be made here and the council decided that they would make the choice and would not allow consultation with the residents. This could be construed as unconstitutional in law. So now the residents are to pay up a set up cost of £1.4m for the system plus an annual extra refuse collection fee of at least £330,000. just for the sake of choice by the council. The matter is very easy to understand, bin bags are OK, we don't need bins, HSE are not demanding that we use bins, so why change. Especially when cut backs and redundancies are in force, it's nonsense really. So what's the real reason Coun.Wallis? Priorities??

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spoorsjone says...
6:27pm Mon 1 Oct 12

Darlo people,abreed apart,impossible to understand!!!

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paul1963 says...
9:49pm Tue 2 Oct 12

Hooray about time, is this Darlington borough council starting to come out of the dark ages and starting to use modern ways of delivering services maybe if they had started years ago the cost to the town would be much lower,there must be many services provided by DBC that could be modernised but this will cost a lot of money and the longer they hold back the more it will cost to change ,example it takes three men to cut the grass verge in front of my house one with a hand machine to cut the edge then one on a ancient ride on mower to cut the middle bit the another to blow the grass away up the road in aycliffe one large machine does the lot the initial outlay wont have been cheap but the long term savings would make it worth while.I wonder how many people would want to go back to using bin bags after they have been using wheelie bins for a year not many i bet unless you like ripped up bin bags and rubbish spilt allover the place

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johnny_p says...
7:51am Wed 3 Oct 12

Shouldn't we be trying to generate less rubbish instead? After one month I usually produce a small carrier bag worth of refuse which I can't recycle or compost. What the hell do I want a massive wheelie bin for?

Plastic is also one of the most environmentally unfriendly products there is, it takes decades to break down when you don't need it any more, as well as requiring oil (a fossil fuel) to make it with.

They're a bloody eyesore too- this council needs to consider this, as well as how many will be left discarded, destroyed and set on fire in our streets.

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bouncer57 says...
8:07pm Wed 3 Oct 12

the people who are against the wheelie bins should try working on the bins in darlo for a week i'm sure they'd quickly change their minds

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ianh says...
9:38am Thu 4 Oct 12

Quite ambivalent towards wheelie bins myself, but cant abide the nasty vindictive words exmplified by M Edwards in todays letters.

From the tone of her letter, its not surpising that any cllr would want to stay well clear.

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Homshaw1 says...
2:17pm Thu 4 Oct 12

spoorsjone wrote:
Darlo people,abreed apart,impossible to understand!!!
What difference does it make how rubbish is collected?

They spend a million pounds and there are no obvious gains in the quality of peoples lives

In the meanwhile sport and leisure facilities are being cut.
There are staff cuts in Child Services. School Transport is cut. Outside the town centre there is a litter problem

This is a poor choice of resource

What is hard to understand about that

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spoorsjone says...
4:16pm Thu 4 Oct 12

Whats hard to understand is peoples disregard for hygiene, and litter from damaged black bags,if they hadn't purchased the new bins there would still be cuts made to council services, just like there is in councils across the country,and there's no use threatening to vote councilor's out,every council of whatever political persuasion have to make cuts to some degree.

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bouncer57 says...
5:22pm Thu 4 Oct 12

Lifetime Townie wrote:
We don't need them for any reason. If anyone is playing at politics it's Councillor Wallis who is desperately trying to justify the need for the wheelie bins so that he can spend the increase in council tax. We can't afford them and HSE say that they are not compulsory so why have them???? After he was voted in it Is now difficult to believe that Councilor Wallis is acting for the benefit of the Darlo residents OR what else??.
may i correct you when you stated hse said they are not compulsory,its because of hse darlington is getting wheelie bins,health and safety being a major issue.The money it costs when council workers are off work with bad backs and ailments because of the heavy weights they are lifting and doing a repetative job,some of these refuse sacks contain weights in them such as broken tiles,plaster,soil,g
rass,broken up furniture and in some cases old car parts,metal and broken glass,bring on the wheelie bins,at least then the workers wont get stabbed with glass,sharp objects,needles.

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Lifetime Townie says...
7:35pm Thu 4 Oct 12

If Bouncer 57 would like to read the accident stats on the council web site relating to Darlo refuse collection you may see that they are less than those for comparable manual jobs. And they will most likely include accidents that have happened due to the handling of the very large wheelie bins. So maybe any bin bag accidents will most likely be no more than accidents that happen in the home. I think that the council know that hse don't compel the use of wheelie bins otherwise they and many other bin bag council would have been prosecuted by now.

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