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Massive Hike In Landfill Tax Announced
The Government has announced a massive hike in Landfill tax, and the building industry is up in arms! This is a charter for fly-tipping if ever there was one. Skip companies are saying that this will kill their business and they are planning to disrupt Jubilee celebrations, then the Olympics. They obviously fear for their livelihoods, but I wouldn’t be so sure that they will lose out.
After the U-turn over pastie tax, they probably think they need a softer target than the militant pastie eating hordes.
There is already a small army of pickup trucks roaming the streets, offering to get rid of rubbish for cash and we know that this rubbish is fly-tipped. It may sit there for a while but sooner or later it has to be removed and most of it is loaded into skips and finishes up in a landfill.
The only difference is that the people who’ll be paying the increased landfill tax, plus the cleanup charges will be the ratepayers. As local authorities have no money as it is, they will find this extra burden hard to bear; but bear it they must, because it won’t be long before the rubbish is piled high in the streets.
The declared intention of this landfill tax, is to encourage manufacturers to think about the reduction of waste, and for the geniuses in Whitehall it all looked so simple. We are sending too much to landfill, so we need to encourage recycling. We have come so far by voluntary actions, winning the hearts and minds of those with green roots, but now we need to punish those nasty builders etc. who are still chucking too much away. The only problem is that builders and home improvers feel they have been punished enough.
If you want to put a skip outside your house where I live it costs you £300, including the licence you have to pay the local authority for clogging up their roads. Post landfill tax hike, there will be a charge of £65 per ton which goes straight to government. I said the “declared intention” of this increase in tax is to reduce landfill, but a very handy spin-off is that the government raises much-needed revenue. After the U-turn over pastie tax, they probably think they need a softer target than the militant pastie eating hordes.
Having said all this, I have some sympathy for the cause of reducing waste to landfill. We do produce way too much rubbish and something needs to be done. The population is increasing, and we are constantly being told that we need economic growth. Growth means that we produce more than we did last year, and more the next year than we did this year. I am no Einstein, but more stuff means more rubbish.
Last year I built a modest extension on a house and by the time it was done I had used 12 skips. I wasn’t happy about this and would have loved to use half that number. What is now being suggested is that the skips are made so expensive, that I put pressure on the merchant and other suppliers to take their packaging back, or better still not to send it in the first place. I also know that stuff is wrapped for protection and ease of handling. If they put less wrapping on things there will be an increased risk of damage which means more wastage.
The only way that this landfill tax issue is going to be resolved is to have a massive increase in recycling, and that means letting builders bring their rubbish into local authority run recycling centres, or taking it back to merchants. I was recently in Germany where plastic and metal containers are brought back to the supermarket, and fed into a machine that sorts them out and gobbles them up. The shopper is then issued with a credit on their next purchase of tins and bottles. It seems to work, but that’s Germany for you.
