MY LONG SUFFERING partner will be pleased. For the first time in years I got bin collection on Monday morning. I decided that it was time for a bit of New Year goodwill and all that. So out went my debugged wheelie. As I drove back from town I spotted the bin man standing over it talking earnestly into a mobile. Maybe getting instructions from HQ. All's well that end's well.

Was it worth it? Yes. The plans to charge for household rubbish collection have been set back. I am sure the generally hostile response of householders made it difficult to push through. The formal position is still that there will be five local trials but local authorities have not been queuing up to volunteer as guinea pigs for pay-per-throw.

The BBC in particular, as befits its role as a semi official broadcaster, gave extensive promotion to pay-per-throw, highlighting the genuine problems of getting rid of the mountains of rubbish that we all generate. Even quite recently, the BBC website was highlighting a rather suspect (or slanted) piece of research which claimed to show that many householders were just waiting to be given the chance to pay directly for their bin collection.

The points that I made, and others did too, about fly tipping and about mums paying most, were never really tackled by the authorities. Instead we were treated to arguments about how they collect household rubbish in Flanders/Switzerland/Germany - you name it - which never talked about the gigantic cultural differences between individualistic Britain and social democratic or socially regimented communities elsewhere. It was a fantasy trip encouraged by ministers. My own experience of pay-per-throw in the (highly individualistic) Republic of Ireland added to my sense of certainty about this issue.

None of the questions asked of South Kesteven District Council have been answered at the time of writing. If the bugs were necessary to empty the bins, how come they empty my bugless bin? If the bugs will produce useful recycling data, where is it, broken down by postcode, so that we can see the saints and the sinners street by street, village by village? No comment. For two years. Opposition councillors should have got this information by now. The truth is of course that the bugs don't work and that council leader Linda Neal is too embarrassed to say so.

Is direct action appropriate? It depends. Where there is a healthy local debate going on, the best advice is to join in and not to engage in stunts. In the case of the bugged wheelie bins of South Kesteven, there never was any debate, the bins were just distributed so a bit of direct action was called for.

There are obvious dangers with direct action. It must always be non violent. It must always be proportionate. And normally it must be designed to achieve something positive. I think the bin protest passes on all three of these tests. In the unlikely event that bin charging comes back onto the agenda I will resume the hostilities, this time with attitude.

I notice that South Norfolk have ruled themselves out of any more bin-buggery while South Kesteven are saying nowt.

Return to Wheeling out the wheelie bins

WRITTEN 5th JANUARY 2009