Having recently undertaken a consultation on the proposed winter shut down for 2014/15, Cheshire East Council has confirmed the dates for this year's suspension of the green bin collections.
Following an outcry from local residents over the decision to shut down the garden waste collection service for 4 months last winter, Cheshire East Council has decided to reduce the length of the suspension for this coming winter.
Councillor David Topping, Cabinet member in charge of the environment, said: "We can confirm that this year's winter suspension, following a public consultation, has been put back to the December 5th, 2014. This means that the length of the suspension has been reduced, so that our service will restart on Feb 16, 2015.
"Whichever week the collection falls, there will be no more than 12 weeks between the last collection in 2014, and the first collection in 2015.
"Each resident will receive a bin sticker which will give the dates for the start and finish of the suspension collection of that particular residential area.
"This information is also available on the Cheshire East Council website for each postcode.
"It should be noted, however, that in the event of extreme weather conditions we may also be unable to undertake the scheduled bin collection."
Last winter the Council suspended the service from 18th November 2013 to 14th March 2014, in a bid to save the authority more than £1m over the next four years. The previous year the Council stopped the fortnightly collection of green bins for a two month period.
The Council subsequently acknowledged that errors had been made and launched the consultation in July so they could "get it right for this year for our residents".
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting in March, Councillor David Topping, Cheshire East Council Cabinet member in charge of the environment, said "We didn't want to introduce charges for the collection of green waste, yet we are committed to saving £2.5m from the budget so we had to make a decision, we'd already got 2 months from previous years of not collecting green waste so we decided to extend it."
Cllr Topping continued "We did not want to charge, a lot of Councils are actually starting to charge for green waste collection, we do not want to go down that route. What I can say is that we learned a lot from this period.
"We did get the dates wrong, and we weren't helped by the weather as well, the winds and so on. The leaves did not start to fall until the end of November so that did not help us either, but nevertheless we went ahead."
Comments
Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below.
I did take part in the survey, so I am pleased that our council are listening to us.
I suggest you make a freedom of information request to Cheshire East asking for the data. To do so go to the following site
http://bit.ly/1yZgerH
Perhaps CEC will use the fuel saved for road/gully sweepers to clear the fallen leaves over those 3 months and prevent highway drains getting blocked. There are still rotting leaves on the roads from last autumn!
http://bit.ly/1vmp8iZ
However, I agree with Jackie that the survey is massively biased towards the outcome the council wanted. So what is the point of this? The cost of this pointless survey could have funded another week of collections.
Whilst it is regrettable that responses favour on-line responses. it is a credit to this website, and others, to publicise the CEC consultation.
With a public consultation, the question(s) posed are at discretion of the questioner and not subject to the constraints imposed by the market research society.
In this instance most question options allowed respondents to make additional comments.
Since it's inception, many CEC decisions have been humiliated by higher Authority, in particular the Lyme Green fiasco, when the CEC response was to publish a heavily re-dacted report to protect some Cllrs and Officers.
CEC elections are due in 2015. Choose wisely.