A letter in the September 24 edition of the Review asked where the FoDDC found 69 per cent of people who wanted to change to fortnightly refuse collections. I haven't found anyone who wants to change but I can in part explain the 69 per cent figure. It is a cheat and should be 52 per cent only.
The Council's own breakdown of the figures says that 24 per cent of people strongly agreed and 28 per cent agreed – that adds up to only 52 per cent in my book. Their figure of 69 per cent includes "17 per cent of people who had no strong feelings".
Your readers might be interested to know the reason why the council is so keen to collect food waste. The Government has set targets for tonnage of refuse but not for environmental impact. Garden waste, glass and food waste are all heavy, so they are the easiest way to gather big tonnages of waste. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with meeting resident requirements or helping the environment.
The suggestion that they have looked at how the food collection service has worked in other places is clearly wrong. If they had consulted other authorities they would not be going ahead with the change here. There are plenty of people in Gloucester who can tell them about the problems. So far our council has taken no account of the difficulties that they will cause numerous residents. Many of us do not have room, either in the kitchen or outside the house, for more bins and where I live we already have a rat problem. We now have to pay for rodent control and it seems that we will also have to pay for green waste collections. I see that as double taxation.
When I previously corresponded with the Forest of Dean District Council to query the extra cost that food waste collections would incur, I was told that the specialist vehicles would be purchased by the contractor. The council don't seem to have recognised that the contractor will need to be paid more if he is to run more expensive vehicles and keep them up to food collection standards.
I do wonder if we should take the situation about the waste questionnaire as a warning about completing Forest of Dean District Council questionnaires. A new one now is asking us to help them decide which part of the budget to cut. I have looked at it on-line and the headings are so broad that most people will not be able to give any meaningful answers. The answers will be different according to where you live – for example look at the 'Cleaning and Maintaining our local environment' heading – I live in a village where the Council has done no cleaning since they insisted on taking over the contract and where our only service is a three monthly street cleaner sweep. The service is so ineffective that they could reduce the frequency and we would probably not be any worse off but I suspect that if I lived in a town I would see a lot better service and so would want to protect the service at its current level.
My real worry is that any answers the public give will be used to tell us that the council is doing what we wanted. I will not be filling in a questionnaire but I am writing to tell them that I think their questionnaire design is faulty and that any inferences drawn from it will be statistically spurious.
My personal view is that they need to review every service to ensure that the cuts are made in a sensible way that does not do permanent damage to our community. – Jenny Eastwood, Huntley.