“O&S” struggles to improve recycling

When the Cabinet system was first introduced, a council’s “overview and scrutiny” committee was intended to scrutinise, closely, the work of the executive – providing some sort of reassurance to the wider Council. Councillors were given “call in” powers, by which they could ask “”O&S” to review a decision made by the Cabinet or Mayor – with the decision being put on hold until the scrutiny had been done. This was the role of the O&S Committee in Tower Hamlets too – though it also began doing a couple of research projects each year, by way of trying to find best practice.

A key factor helping O&S to undertake its work was that it was peopled, and usually chaired, by the opposition. That worked enough well when the Council was fairly evenly divided between a major party and an opposition party (or even two). If the opposition scrutinised a decision of the executive, it was thought, there were more grounds for the public to be reassured and decisions would have an air of consensus rather than dictatorship (as might otherwise be inherent in the Cabinet and, even more so, in the directly elected Mayor model).

Thus when Lutfur Rahman was Mayor, Labour Chairs of O&S would be pouring over his every Cabinet and personal decisions, often asking him to reconsider. All this has changed under Labour’s John “two jobs” Biggs. The O&S committee is chaired by Labour’s Cllr John Pierce, and although it still calls in decisions John Biggs has made from time to time, it is now doing much more project work – looking into areas of the Council’s work and helping John Biggs out by drawing up the odd protocol or two.

Thus it was that on 4th April the Overview and Scrutiny Committee provided John Biggs with recommendations on how to improve recycling in the Borough. This might have rankled somewhat with Councillor Ayas Miah, one of the four councillors of Bangladeshi heritage in this diverse nine-member Cabinet (and one of the four men, who are outnumbered by the five women).

As Cabinet Member for the Environment, he might have expected to lead an investigation into recycling, be in charge of preparing a report and then presenting it at Cabinet – and even at Council. Instead, it will be Cllr Pierce. Ungenerous soles might say it’s all very well having a diverse Cabinet, but if you keep getting other councillors to take on areas of its work, you just dilute the effectiveness of that diversity. Still, they are all Labour Party colleagues, and Cllr Miah is doubtless very relaxed about Cllr Pierce taking the front line role on recycling.

Unfortunately, the twelve recommendations Cllr Pierce’s O&S have come up with are not great. They sound very much like ideas which might be hatched up by any group of officers not otherwise in touch with real life on the streets. O&S kept in mind that improvements might be able to save the Council, say, £500,000 a year, which could be spent on even better front line services – so this was not an exercise in tinkering around for the sake of it. Here’s the list of recommendations they came up with, with comments below each recommendation.

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Recommendation 1: Review the Local Reward Scheme running in the borough with a view to implementing it more widely.
What is the Local Reward Scheme? Who knows? It is probably so little known that it does need reviewing, but who will review it – O&S, or are they giving this work to Cllr Miah?

Recommendation 2: Promote and co-ordinate visits to the Material Recovery Facility (MRF) for residents and estates staff.
This is a good idea, and has been suggested many times before – but not implemented previously because of the cost. Visits used to be reported in East End Life, but now John Biggs has ruled that East End Life can only come out four times a year, there will probably not be room. Promoting the visits will have to be done elsewhere, at a cost.

Recommendation 3: Promote messages about recycling to residents through ESOL sessions.
This is not a bad idea. The Council has to find other ways of promoting recycling now that it can no longer use East End Life. However, ESOL classes will only catch a very small number of the Borough’s residents.

Recommendation 4: Improve communication and education campaigns by making the additional costs associated with dealing with contaminated recycling waste explicit. Include clear explanatory messages about issues such as food waste and using black bin liners.
Fair enough: if people knew that recycling can bring costs down (liberating money for other services), they may take more care. How will the message be communicated (not through East End Life)? How will the education campaigns be run? The Council’s Environmental Services Department used to put a great deal of effort into working with schools, particularly primary schools – but this tried and tested example of good practice doesn’t get a mention in the recommendation. One of the messages residents most need to hear about food waste is how it is collected – with the collection scheme restricted almost exclusively to “streetside properties” (i.e., houses), it has little impact on the borough as a whole. There is scope for an imaginative boroughwide scheme, following on from good practice elsewhere, to tie collection by Environmental Services together with Parks and horticulture in a food waste recycling scheme.

Recommendation 5: Promote recycling messages on paper communications from the council (e.g. envelopes).
This is far enough – but the cost of overprinting on envelopes the messages that used to go into East End Life should be added to the sums of whether closing East End Life has saved or cost the Council money.

Recommendation 6: Improve the size, quality, quantity and distribution of bags provided for residents for recycling waste, for example:
• introduce smaller bags;
• increase the number of bags produced to meet demand; and
• increase the number of collection points bags can be obtained.
Smaller bags were introduced a few months ago: are they to become smaller still? Some residents have room to store larger bags which take two or three days recycling from a household of four, and they prefer to make fewer trips to their estate recycling bins. Other households may need smaller bags. Why can’t there be a choice? Having more collection points for bags would be very welcome, as it’s virtually impossible for residents to get hold of them these days (not least because the Council has closed many of the offices which used to be collection points). However, opening more collection points without education residents will be fairly useless – enough pink bags turn up in the general rubbish and in areas of fly-tipped waste as it is.

Recommendation 7: Introduce a re-balancing of general and recycling waste bins on estates in the borough.
This may or may not be a good idea as it is entirely unclear what it means. It probably means “provide more recycling bins on estates”. Again, this may be a good idea – or perhaps the funds should go into keeping the same number of bins but collecting them more often (which would reduce the potential for contamination too).

Recommendation 8: Undertake a feasibility study to assess the suitability of a range of alternative service design improvements including re-use facilities in the borough.
This could mean anything. Who will be doing the feasibility study: O&S, or is Cllr Miah going to be allowed to run it?

Recommendation 9: Promote the THHF public-realm sub group, encourage attendance and the sharing of good practice amongst Registered Providers.
This is a very strange recommendation. “THHF” is the Tower Hamlets Housing Forum, the name given to the group that local housing associations have set up. The Forum is a secretive body, which does not let residents know what is going on. When the Tower Hamlets Federation of Tenants and Residents Associations offered to send observers to the Forum’s meetings to improve communication between residents and landlords, the Forum replied that it would be inappropriate to have “outsiders” at its meetings. The Forum has around half a dozen sub-committees where housing association staff talk to their counterparts in other housing associations. Landlords vary in terms of the recycling facilities they provide, and the Council does need to get most of them to do very much better on many aspects of recycling – such as the provision of recycling bins and bags, keeping the bins safe and educating residents on how to use them.

Recommendation 10: Amend Local Plan policy DM14 Managing Waste to provide more explicit guidance on waste and recycling facilities.
It’s hard to oppose this recommendation, but it is unclear what it is intended to achieve and how this will be monitored.

Recommendation 11: Work with developers to incorporate innovative general waste and recycling waste management systems into the Isle of Dogs opportunity area, area planning framework where possible.
Good for the Isle of Dogs, its opportunity area and the planning framework. Can standards for recycling provision not be set which have to be taken into account by all developers, in both opportunity areas and the housing zones?

Recommendation 12: Lobby Government to require packaging industry to include standardised recyclability messages on all recyclable material.
Packaging could be improved – but whatever the message on the package, it is only relevant if your local Council processes that particular kind of recyclable waste.

Let’s see what the Cabinet, and the Council, make of it all.

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