Some comments from Cllr. Kieran Binchy on the withdrawal of Dublin City Council’s bin collection service
I have already posted a list of FAQs on the practicalities of the change, but here I want to address the political reasons for the changes. I still believe that Dublin City Council is right to withdraw from the waste collection market, but they way in which the Council has gone about withdrawing has been completely unacceptable. I realise that people are concerned by these changes, and the lack of communication from both City Council and Greyhound has been one of the main contributors to the problem . I also wish to state my opposition to the €100 up-front charge. Please note that the following only applies to Dublin City Council customers – if your waste is already collected by a private operator you should be unaffected.
Levels of service
I am aware that residents have serious valid concerns about how the withdrawal of Dublin City Council could affect them. Residents expressed a number of practical concerns to me, so I have campaigned for the withdrawal to involve as little disruption to the customers of Dublin City Council as possible. I raised a number of issues with the City Manager. For example, the following is the text of my question to the City Manager in November 2011:
Question to City Manager City Council Meeting 07/11/2011
Q72. COUNCILLOR KIERAN BINCHY
To ask the Manager to ensure that in the outsourcing of the bin collection, the following serious issues are covered so that no loss of level of service occurs:
• The waiver continues in place at least at the same level
• Rubbish Bags are still an option for those with no suitable front yard or garden for wheelie bins
• Inaccessible streets and lanes are still collected, either by bin-men walking down and collecting from outside houses or by residents leaving bins at a suitable location
• City Council street cleaning continues to take into account the collection times
CITY MANAGER’S REPLY:
Street cleaning will continue to take into account bin collection schedules following any structural change to the service. In relation to the other matter raised these will be dealt with as part of the arrangement which will be put in place. The City Council wishes to ensure that there is no diminution in the service provided to customers.
The €100 charge up-front – unacceptable
Greyhound has since announced that it will be charging an up-front service charge of €100 per customer. This is a huge change from Dublin City Council’s charging arrangements, and is unacceptable. The councillors on the Fine Gael group have made their opposition to this charge very clear to the manager. Many people cannot afford another charge on their household, given the measures that the current government has already had to introduce. While the polluter-pays principle applies, and therefore people legally must be charged for bin collection, an upfront charge is a recipe for disaster. Greyhound should apply the same charging methods and criteria as Dublin City Council applied.
However, while the charge is an unacceptable measure, the overall decision to withdraw is still the correct one. Anything else under the current legislation would be a waste of public money, for the following reasons:
The privatisation of the bin collection service happened long ago
The first thing to consider is that the waste collection market was privatised long ago. What has happened until now is that Dublin City Council has competed against private waste collectors in this privatised market.
Under current Irish law, there is no restriction on private sector waste collectors offering their service to households in Ireland. This is because national government introduced a system of “competition in the market” with a range of collectors operating in any one area as opposed to the more normal system in European countries of “competition for the market” in which local authorities tender for a single collector to provide the service in a particular area. Dublin City Council does not have the legal power to regulate the market, and was only able to compete in the market as one of those many players. It was estimated that increased landfill costs would increase the cost of competing by over €2 million in the next year, and this money would have to come from somewhere – out of the taxes and rates paid by residents and businesses. So people would be double-paying to have their bins collected by Dublin City Council while private operators are able to do it at a lower cost. This is why almost every other Council in the country has withdrawn and left the collection to the private operators.
Dublin City Council as a regulator of the market – hopefully coming soon
Dublin City Council expects to have the power to regulate the market within a few years. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has recently issued a number of discussion documents and is accepting submissions with the intention of moving to a position of “competition for the market” in 2012. Under proposed legislation, it is expected that local authorities such as Dublin City Council, as regulators, will tender out waste collection and a single collector will be selected in respect of each area tendered. This will, if enacted, do away with the current situation whereby multiple collectors are collecting in any given area and constantly seeking to take customers from each other for their collection service.
Why don’t Councillors prevent the €100 charge?
Under Waste Management legislation, all decisions about waste management services are made by the City Manager, and the Councillors have no legal power in the area. What we can do is try to pressure and lobby the manager into making the right decision and the Fine Gael councillors have been doing that with regards to the charge. It was only at the January meeting of City Council that the City Manager revealed to City Councillors that under the deal he had done with Greyhound, customers would be faced with this charge. The Fine Gael group of councillors immediately voiced their opposition to this charge, and expressed serious concern over the fact that the charge had not been mentioned at any stage prior to this.
What about the workers?
I would like to commend all the bin collection workers who have served the people of Dublin for the last 145 years through hail, rain and snow, proudly and persistently.
No workers are made redundant by this decision. All Council workers are being redeployed to other roles in the Council, filling gaps caused by the civil service embargo. This is a positive solution for the Council, which has lost staff in street-cleaning and in the parks division, for example. Tactical redeployment of the Council staff will allow the Council to improve services in these other areas. However, many of the bin collection workers were unhappy about forced re-deployment, and I therefore called for the manager out of respect for the workers to also offer voluntary redundancy. This has not happened.
If you have any further questions on the withdrawal of the Council from the waste collection market please consult the FAQs here, or give me a call on 087 177 4365.