Sinister goings on at our town halls. It appears that 68 of them have already installed microchips in to our bins without even telling us. That is more than three million households in Britain who are well equipped to be taxed for their waste in Government "pay as you throw" proposals. This is despite the fact that a channel four survey revealed nearly two thirds of us are against the idea. It is quite clear that the Government is trying to force this extra tax through the back door and they are disguising it as green measure. It's primary purpose is more tax however and that is why there has been no consultation and the local councils have been very quiet on the matter.
Take the response from the Local Government Association [LGA] - apparently virtually all the current microchips were "inert", and that modern bins come already fitted with them. As if to say, "they just come like that, there's nothing we can do about it and the thought of using them to monitor households hadn't even crossed our minds". The Tories have done an FOI request that reveals the Government has directly funded the instalment of these chips. It also revealed that one in seven councils has the chipped bins, yet the LGA "only know of 30". Open government? Big Brother more like.
Comments
Control
You have to have a rather fascist mentality to see putting chips inside bins are the way to promote recycling.
Fear and threats
Sinister really isn't it? Why trust the people to do something if the government can force you through fear and threats, eh? Also, surely all this is likely to do is encourage some less than 100% honest people to slip the odd bin bag in the neighbour's bins or fly tip down the end of the street?
Free-riders
I agree that trying to sneek this through is a bad idea, but we do need to find a way to charge people proportionately to their use of the service. As things stand, like the NHS, it is almost impossible to constrain demand for anything that is free at the point of use. We need to scrap all the quangos that are currently squandering the large amounts of money raised from the waste industry, and plough that money instead into enforcement (e.g. dealing with fly-tippers). Then we should allow waste-collection services to compete with each other, charging how and as much as they see fit (including by weight if they chose). Let's find out what the most efficient ways of dealing with our wastes are, without inefficiencies and free-riding being underwritten by our council tax, and without a single option being foisted on all of us by our local council.