Glasgow fly-tipping crisis worsened by City Chamber choices
A blend of deliberate policy choices and enforcement decisions by the SNP led City Council have made a mild problem significantly worse.
Glasgow is a proud city with an indefatigable sense of pride. It’s the home of the ‘red Clydeside’. The city of dockyard workers and manual labourers and a powerful trades union tradition. But also home to the grand city mansions in the wealthy postcodes - a legacy of the industrialist, tobacco and cotton barons who profited from empire.
Opulent residential streets intermingle next door to appallingly deprived ‘sink estates’. A city that - on the one hand - is replete with references to Hanoverians and Unionism, but also home to a history of anti-Catholic repression.
The Glasgow City Chambers tells part of the story many are more comfortable with. An incredible building with an exterior boasting of the Beaux-Arts architectural style. A style which originated from the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from the 1830s. It is an awe inspiring mix of French neoclassicism, Gothic and Renaissance elements. Queen Victoria herself opened the City Chambers in 1888.
I find the building which is home to our City Council is both beautiful, splendid, palatial but at the same time a monument to the heart wrenching inequality that is part of the city fabric. Glasgow has always been this way. Those of us who are Glaswegians know our city and love it nevertheless.
But Glasgow is in crisis and in more ways than many think. My home city can lay claim to a series of unwanted accolades as COP26 arrives in town. Glasgow is home to the UKs ten poorest areas, suffers one of Europe’s worst drug death rates and reportedly has the UKs fourth biggest rat population (which Cllr Susan Aitken doesn’t seem to have a problem with). So it boggles the mind when we witness a series of deliberate SNP policy choices turn us into a fly-tipping capital of Britain.
And be under no illusions, the SNP-led City Council has enacted a series of policy choices that - when taken all together - have dramatically escalated the waste problem in the city. For example, on July 5th 2021 the SNP administration introduced the bulk waste uplift charges. These charges are £35 for 10 standardised items or £35 each for large electrical items. Now this in of itself is not necessarily an indefensible policy - far from it. In fact a robust case can be made for introducing modest charges to reduce the bulk waste the city produces. But the problem with doing this arrives when at the same time the city fails to enforce fly tipping fines.
The number of fly tipping fines issued are dropping. Last year alone witnessed over 20,000 fly-tipping reports lodged to Glasgow City Council. But only 33 fines were issued in the city. Additionally, the number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued for fly-tipping have dropped over the last five years straight.
In 2016/17 486 fines were issued, 2017/18 this drops to 295. In 2018/19 just 150 issued. And this is despite 103,000 fly-tipping cases reported from 2016 to August 2021.
But there is more. The SNP run City Council has also switched over to a request-only bulk uplift on Dec 10th 2020. This is despite there being previously designated pick-up points for collection on ‘bulk days’. How many Glasgow residents are even aware that the regular bulk pick-ups no longer happens? I am willing to bet that many city residents are unlikely to know they now need to personally phone to arrange a bulk pick-up.
So we begin to see a picture forming. The SNP run City Council is charging people for bulk uplifts (a service historically free in Glasgow), failing to enforce fly tipping fines and switching over to bulk collection by appointment instead of maintaining the more-familiar bulk collection day. All at the same time.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that this mixture of policy choices has worsened the city’s trash problems. Any one of these policies can - in isolation - have a fair case made in their defence. But the art of good governance is understanding and anticipating how new policies might all impact on each other. It is rapidly becoming obvious that Cllr Susan Aitken’s administration has failed to do so.
In the interests of fairness we should all accept that the COVID pandemic will have had a negative impact. And if we look at 2020, we find more reports of fly tipping than council collections. It is reasonable to accept that this discrepancy could be largely attributed to the COVID pandemic. After all, the pandemic meant fewer staff on the streets. But this can only take us so far in explaining the city’s waste and trash problems.
The COVID pandemic does not explain away why fines for fly tipping have been dropping year on year since 2016/17. Nor does it explain the City Council’s opting to introduce bulk waste charges at the same time fly-tipping is being punished less and less. This is not a hard equation to work out: fly tipping will rise as fines drop, especially when people are being confronted with bills for bulk waste collection they’ve never had to pay before.
Furthermore, SNP local government austerity is the final piece of all of this. The pandemic does not explain decisions to reduce budgets and staff in the city cleansing department. Chris Mitchell is the GMB Scotland Convenor for Glasgow City Council Cleansing, and he told the Daily Mail
There's a complete denial by the SNP that the city is in crisis. I've never seen a decline this horrendous.
Over the past six to seven years, our budget has been obliterated. It's a risk to public health and safety, and in the summer the city stinks. It's actually embarrassing.
This is a man who started working for the city as a street cleaner 30 years ago. And he also points out that the number of street cleaners has collapsed from around 800-900 down to just 213. Additionally he reveals
The number of refuse collectors has gone down from 1,300 to 800. And the council often has to hire agency workers, who have no pensions, or don't even know if they have a job at the end of the week.
Of course this brings us to a final point: the SNP administration in Glasgow has failed to stand up to Nicola Sturgeon’s cuts to local government. Rather than push back, the administration under Cllr Susan Aitken has not just implemented Sturgeon’s austerity, but actively tries to champion it.
We know that Nicola Sturgeon in Edinburgh has imposed £937m in cuts to Scottish local governments over the last eight years. And according to Audit Scotland Glasgow City Council under the SNP has
a track record of delivering significant savings in recent years. During 2019/20the council delivered £19.3m in savings which was 85% of its savings target of £22.6m
What this reveals is the SNP administration in City Chambers had a plan to force through ‘savings’ (or cuts to you and me) regardless of a pandemic. Presumably it is easier for SNP politicians to just implement Glasgow’s share of Nicola Sturgeon’s austerity agenda than actually stand up to her.
81.3% of Glasgow City Council’s budget is ScotGov grant funding according to the City Council itself. And this has been cut by 15% since 2010. And what does Susan Aitken, SNP leader of the City Council say about the ‘savings’ her administration is hell-bent on making? Savings which mean firing refuse collectors and opting for agency workers who are easier to exploit. What is her response? She rejects the argument that people
can’t manage unless the council is there, not just holding their hand but doing it for them
Her SNP colleagues have hailed the cuts, reduced services, and policy choices worsening the city trash problems as ending “the old-style socialism of Scottish Labour”.
So sorry folks, your home city might smell, lost under mountains of waste amid an exploding rat population - but just grin and bear with it. Cllr Susan Aitken wishes to end “municipal paternalism” you see. Baroness Thatcher might have already passed on, but Cllr Aitken and the SNP here in Glasgow seem desperate to channel her rhetoric. In the meantime, shame about all the trash.
Sources
Glasgow Times ‘Here's how many fly-tipping reports and collections were made across Glasgow in 2020’ - click here
Daily Mail ‘Glasgow dubbed Glasgow’s fly-tipping capital’ - click here
Glasgow Times ‘Fears Glasgow's fly-tipping will rise as fines drop’ - click here
Glasgow Live ‘Glasgow City Council start charging for bulk waste uplift next week’ - click here
“All cities have rats”, Cllr Susan Aitken’s comments on the rat population explosion in the city at the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee - click here
Herald ‘SNP told to 're-set' councils' relationship after £937m cuts revealed’ - click here
Audit Scotland ‘Glasgow City Council 2019/20 Annual Audit Report’ - click here
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