Good on you Ann Ayre, that’s what I say. Ann is the chair of the residents’ association on the Winget housing estate in Glasgow and she and her fellow members have decided to take a stand on an issue that’s been particularly affecting them but is relevant right across the city. I guess you could call it the bins rebellion and I hope it’s the start of something bigger.

The issue for Ann and her fellow residents, as well as lots of others I’m sure, is the charge that’s been introduced for brown bins. As you know, brown bins are for garden waste only and until recently Glasgow City Council (current council tax: £1,334 to £4,677) collected them as part of its regular services. Not anymore. If you want your brown bins collected now, you’re going to need to cough up 50 quid. No 50-quid, no pick-up.

The figures on how many people this issue affects are interesting. Some 122,000 properties are eligible to get the £50 permit but so far only 21,070 have done so. The council says it believes the numbers will increase when the summer comes and hedges and grass need cutting and I’m sure they’re right. But the low take-up may also be a small but encouraging sign of resistance to the idea that people should have to pay extra on top of their council tax to have certain types of rubbish collected.

This is certainly what’s going on in the Winget estate. Ann Ayre says she’s not surprised that the take-up of the permits has been so low at a time when a lot of people she knows don’t have much cash. She also says her members are opposed to the idea of forking out for something they think should be covered by council tax and they’ve decided to take a stand and hope other people across the city will follow suit.

I hope so too, I must say, and not just because, like Ann, I think the collection of rubbish and waste should be part of our council tax. It’s also because I think the idea of charging extra to pick up rubbish (and remember bulk items also incur an extra charge in Glasgow) is likely to make the crisis of litter and waste in Glasgow worse, not better. Refusing to pick up people’s rubbish unless they pay an extra charge is also looking at the issue the wrong way up.

Why the wrong way up? Well, for a start, it’s in areas of deprivation that the problem of littering and fly-tipping tends to be worse and yet a flat charge of £50 has been introduced that’s likely to have a disproportionately negative effect in those areas. Fifty quid in Bearsden? No big deal, the rubbish is gone. But it is a big deal for a lot of people in Carntyne and other areas (not to mention the bulk pick-up charges) and if people cannot, and do not, pay up, what happens? More rubbish gets dumped in their area. Therefore: the problem is made worse where it most needs to be tackled.

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It seems to me the answer is not to charge extra at all for the brown bins, or any bins for that matter, but if the council is going to do it anyway, why make no provision for the less well-off? Ann says there should be a reduced fee for the elderly and vulnerable or a payment plan to spread the cost and she’s right. She’s also right, for similar reasons, to reject the council’s argument that people can still take their rubbish to the tip for free. As Ann points out, lots of people don’t have cars and, again, it’s a problem that particularly affects deprived areas, where rubbish is now more likely to get dumped. As I say: wrong way up.

The other way in which the approach to waste and litter is topsy-turvy is we’re assuming we can introduce a charge and punish anyone who refuses to pay and dumps their rubbish anywhere they like. The Scottish Government made a big thing recently of increasing the fines for people who fly-tip and it’s a big rise, from £200 to £500. But as a friend of mine discovered recently when tons of rubbish were dumped on her land, finding the people responsible is very hard and if you don’t catch the culprit, the fact you might have theoretically fined them £500, or £5000 for that matter, is rather beside the point.

Effectively what’s happening is two things. First, councils are seeking to reframe their responsibility to deal with waste and litter as something they can charge extra for and I have some sympathy for their dilemma in a way. The Scottish Government has cut their budgets and ringfenced the money they do give them for government priorities, so councils are scrambling around for other ways to make cash. But that doesn’t change the fundamentals: rubbish should be covered by council tax.

The second problem is that in trying to charge people extra, the councils are introducing a policy that runs counter to how humans behave and that’s never a good start. If rubbish collection is free at the point of collection, more rubbish will be collected rather than being dumped indiscriminately.

Conversely, if you do charge extra, people will try to find ways of avoiding the payment and the result is going to be the old fridge and rubble dumped at the bottom of your street, and the streets of Glasgow can’t take anymore. As Chris Mitchell, the convenor of the GMB union which represents a lot of refuse workers, said recently: we can all see that Glasgow is in decay.

In fact, on a more positive note, the GMB is one of the interested parties in this area that’s come up with a good idea, inspired by what happens in European countries such a Belgium and France (who always seem to do it better than Scotland). What happens there is that there are big recycling hubs where people can drop off their unwanted items but more importantly other people can take the items away if they want to for a nominal charge: tables, chairs, sofas, whatever.

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It’s ideas like that one that are going to help fix the problem of rubbish in Glasgow, rather than slapping an extra £50 on people who don’t have a lot of money. The council insists more people will stump up as the year progresses (and lots will). But perhaps the resistance of Ann Ayre and the Winget residents’ association can highlight how wrong the policy is. And perhaps then we’ll start asking the questions we need to ask. Such as: how do we deal with our rubbish? How do we do it fairly? And most importantly: how do we pay for it?