Council Cuts: Eric Pickles talks 'rubbish' (again)

There is one thing that could derail the government's localism programme, Communities secretary Eric Pickles declared today and it has nothing to do with homelessness, council job losses, Riven Vincent, the worst council finance settlement ever, or much-loved local charities going bust. No, the most serious threat on the horizon is cuts to dustbin collections.

All the supposed benefits of localism for councils would be swept away, Pickles argued at a New Local Government Network conference this morning, if local authorities continued to insist on fortnightly bin collections rather than weekly ones. Middle England, so often pummelled by the "iron fist of the municipal state," would lose all confidence in their local town hall. Said Pickles:

"If we do not sort this out then the cause of localism will be set back a generation."

Pickles' obsession with bins is well documented - it is a populist passion he conveniently shares with the Daily Mail. But it seems extraordinary that Pickles made bin collection cuts the centrepiece of a speech to an audience of senior local government executives and council leaders, who might have expected him to engage with their efforts to implement organisation-wide cost-cutting on an unprecedented scale.

As one senior town hall figure said afterwards:

"We've got so much to talk about and all he goes on about is bloody bins."

Pickles' passion for bins is deep-rooted: he was an assiduous tabler of parliamentary questions on the issue when in opposition, seemingly at inordinate expense to the tax payer. Last year he told the Daily Mail:

"It's a basic right for every English man and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in their bin without having to wait a fortnight for it to be collected."

Rubbish is, it has to be said, a useful distraction technique in an era of brutal cuts. Earlier this month Pickles' colleague, local government minister Bob Neil, wrote to councils accusing them of "complacency" over their failure to tackle alleged backlogs in bin collection over the Christmas period.

But why? There had been no national media reports of bin bag mountains rotting in the street, and only a scattering of local media stories, according to the Local Government Information Unit. The Local Government Association, which had collated reports on waste collection during the Christmas freeze from its members, was also baffled:

"The reports have, at worst, indicated problems in around 20 out of over 350 collection authorities, and many of those appear to be issues affecting a small number of very local areas, not the whole of the authority."

According to some reports, Pickles was considering ordering new guidance for local authorities, urging them to ditch fortnightly bin collections. That does not sit easily with his commitment to localism however, and may anyway be ignored by councils. Despite Pickles' exhortations, more councils - including a number of Tory controlled town halls - are switching to fortnightly collections, because the system is cost effective and working well. As the Yorkshire Post this month reported:

"A spokesman for Kirklees Council said that since fortnightly collections began, the amount of rubbish collected door-to-door had fallen by a quarter, while recycling had increased by 50 per cent."

Strangely, Pickles is not in sole charge of government policy over waste collection and recycling - that's the responsibility of environment secretary Caroline Spelman, with whom Pickles is, according to CLG, "working closely". There have been reports of bitter conflict between the two departments - "uncorroborated", says the CLG press office: "Both are committed to helping councils improve the frequency of rubbish collections."

Councils may well feel they have bigger issues on their plate than bin collection; but as the harsh impact of the cuts become ever clearer, I suspect "rubbish" is an issue Pickles will be returning to again and again.