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Now ministers plan to levy a £50 tax on your lawn clippings
Last updated at 23:22pm on 08.06.07Millions of homeowners face a new "garden tax" that will make them pay for the first time to get rid of their grass cuttings.
Ministers are encouraging councils to charge families £50 a year to take away lawn clippings, leaves and prunings as part of the Government's plans to force households to recycle more of their rubbish.
Documents drawn up for ministers say that homeowners need to compost far more of their garden waste, but few are willing to do this so they need to be encouraged by incentives or penalties.
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Waste bill: Not one but three new taxes are planned
The best way to force more composting is to impose charges for collecting garden clippings, councils have been told.
At the moment this costs around £50 per householder every year – which is likely to be the amount of the new tax.
Charges for removing garden waste mean that not one but three new rubbish taxes will come in as part of the Government's "waste strategy".
First, homes that put out more than a strict quota of household rubbish that cannot be recycled will be made to pay a charge.
Then families who take their waste to the local municipal tip will be charged for it under new laws proposed by Environment Secretary David Miliband.
Now, on top of this, pressure for a garden tax means people who do not compost their cuttings will face charges too.
Around 75 councils already impose some form of charge for collecting garden waste.
However, they do so by asking householders to pay for bags or a garden waste bin, rather than by imposing a weekly charge or billing by weight.
Another 270 authorities which collect rubbish have no charges for garden waste. But these councils have now been told that if they wish to keep their garden collection service free, they will have to absorb heavy costs or pile them on to council tax bills. Council tax protesters and campaigners against the scrapping of weekly bin collections responded with fury to the new garden tax plans.
Doretta Cocks of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection said: "This is another loss of service for council tax payers. All those people who have a free garden waste collection are likely to lose it.
"Of course, like rising council tax bills, this will hit the elderly. It will have the biggest impact in suburbs and the countryside, and the target will be middle-class people. This Government never ceases to amaze me."
Christine Melsom of the Is It Fair? council tax protest group said: "This is another example of the search for new ways to make people pay more taxes. They are looking at every corner to find new things to tax. Clearly, there is an effort to scrape at every possibility to make people pay."
Mr Miliband announced his new "waste strategy" last month in the wake of the local elections that saw voters punish councillors and parties which imposed fortnightly rubbish collections in place of weekly bin pickups.
The Daily Mail's Great Bin Revolt campaign highlighted how a third of the population has been denied the weekly rubbish collections that have been established for more than 130 years.
A report by the Eunomia Consultancy carried out for Mr Miliband's waste recycling agency, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, found that the typical English garden produces 8lb of grass cuttings per square yard every year.
Pruning trees and bushes and sweeping up leaves produces the same amount again.
