Council tax bills may increase by £100 to meet soaring cost of recycling

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Rubbish taxes: Householders are being put under increasing pressure to reduce the amount of waste they produce

Council taxes may have to go up by around £100 a year for the average family to meet European demands for recycling rubbish, town halls said yesterday.

They warned that the cost of bin collections and disposing of refuse will more than double over the next six years to meet targets set by Brussels.

And alongside the threat of big hikes in council tax, families and householders will face new efforts by councils to make them leave out less rubbish, an increase in the number of the highly unpopular fortnightly rubbish collection schemes, and new pay-as-you-throw wheelie bin taxes.

The Local Government Association, the umbrella body for councils, gave the tax warning yesterday in a document aimed at Chancellor Gordon Brown, who is preparing a major review of how much cash help the Government gives to town halls. Councils say they cannot cope without much more money from the Treasury.

Yesterday they pointed to EU directives that require three cuts of a quarter in the amount of waste sent to landfill by 2010, and to rising taxes on landfill use imposed by Mr Brown to encourage councils to comply.

The LGA estimated that the cost of meeting the targets means that town hall spending on rubbish disposal will reach £4.2 billion in 2012, more than double 2003 levels and a 60 per cent increase on current costs.

The extra £1.6 billion that will be needed according to these calculations comes to nearly eight per cent of the entire amount raised by council tax. Added to council tax, it would mean just under £100 extra on the bills for someone paying the current benchmark Band D bill of £1,268.

Warnings over extra taxation for rubbish come at a time of deepening public discontent over the way town halls are putting the pressure on families to leave out less rubbish.

Compulsory recycling schemes, the abandonment of weekly rubbish collections in favour of picking up the bins only once a fortnight, and fines for those who leave out too much rubbish, leave it out on the wrong day, or even fail to close the lids of their bins have provoked widespread anger.

Local authorities have also begun putting hidden chips into wheelie bins that can measure the weight of waste thrown out. The figures can be used by town halls if they get the go-ahead to start taxing families with "pay as you throw" bills.

Yesterday's paper by the LGA told the Treasury that without more Government money "local government would be required to make savings of almost 20 per cent a year on waste budgets by 2010. This is obviously not achievable."

It said that to do their part councils would increasingly use methods to "change behaviour and minimise waste, such as alternate weekly collection and pay as you throw schemes".

LGA chairman Lord Bruce-Lockhart said: "The Government has over the past few years taken a decision to require local government to spend 50 per cent more on services, but it has not raised income tax and has instead relied on increases in indirect taxes, stealth taxes and council tax.

"The Government must be honest about the impact of this."

Ministers accused town halls of trying to put pressure on Whitehall. Local Government Minister Phil Woolas said: "If local government wants to be a partner in governance and the delivery of services with national government they have to talk the language of balanced books and not that of a pressure group.

"No government has ever put such sustained investment into local services, with a real terms increase of 39 per cent since 1997. Council tax payers will not put up with excessive council tax increases and neither will we."

 

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