Savings outweigh the cost (From Malvern Gazette)

Savings outweigh the cost

10:56am Friday 13th July 2007 in Letters

IN response to Mr Paddock's letter (Gazette, July 6) regarding the commercial vehicle and trailer permit scheme, there would appear to be a number of misconceptions regarding the scheme.

Firstly, the reason that we have introduced this scheme is that the household waste sites cannot legally accept commercial waste as it would be in contravention of the site licence.

This has always been the case and the permit scheme is simply a more effective method of enforcing this.

Furthermore, the illegal use of these sites by commercial operators bears a heavy cost on the council tax-payer as it is expensive to process waste.

The cost of implementing and administering this scheme is far outweighed by the savings that will be made from preventing the illegal depositing of waste at these sites.

It is the responsibility of commercial operators to make their own arrangements for dealing with their waste and there are a number of local companies that provide such a service at reasonable cost. These can be found in the Yellow Pages under Waste Disposal.

We do recognise that residents do use commercial-type vehicles and trailers to deposit their household waste and this is why we have introduced this scheme so that they are not unfairly penalised. There is no limit to the amount of permits that residents can have, the only limit being eight per application.

This kind of scheme is commonplace throughout the UK and, before we implemented this scheme, we spoke with many other authorities about their experiences.

All of them said that they not only saw a fall in the waste going to the sites but that there was no significant increase in fly-tipping.

The criminals that fly-tip waste are well aware of the rules and are likely to do so regardless of any scheme that we implement.

Ian Holebrook, Waste Services Manager, Worcestershire County Council.