Council Plans to Remove Litter Bins Really are Garbage.

Politics, particularly local politics, is seldom about marches, placards and grand speeches made from the podium to an adoring crowd. Instead it is about little things that for all they are resolutely prosaic; are also hugely important.

There is no better example of this than the issue of Stoke-on-Trent City Council deciding to get rid of a third of its 3000 litter bins.

This is part of the emergency budget the council pushed through on the Thursday of last week that sees 42 jobs being axed. In this instance it sees £710,000 being cut from its Streetcare and Greenspace services.

Councillor Dan Jellyman, the cabinet member with responsibility for regeneration told the Sentinel the problem was there are ‘lots of bins which are close together’.

He cited as examples the Longton transport interchange, which is used by only one bus an hour after First Potteries pulled their services out, yet has eight litter bins and bins being located outside schools that have been closed.

He added that the review of litter bin locations, the council’s favoured euphemism for removing a service, was about ‘saving the time of officers who have to empty these bins, as we will have a reduced workforce’. The remaining staff would then be freed up to do other jobs such as ‘litter picking and tackling fly-tipping’.

Yes, you did read that last line right because it was written how Councillor Jellyman said it, getting rid of litter bins will free up council staff to pick up the litter people would have put in the bins that aren’t there anymore. If someone who employs that kind of logic ever comes to ‘save’ your village it might be a good idea to start worrying about just how they’ll do so.

It must be endlessly frustrating for the council to send staff out to empty litter bins that aren’t used because there is little or no footfall in the areas where they are placed. The solution to this problem though is relocation; not removal.

A city that starts taking away litter bins from public places, sadly I fear removing a third this time will be only the start, is inviting problems. They may be doing so, mostly, inadvertently, but they are doing so all the same.

Litter blowing free in the streets is the first sign of a city in decline, followed soon afterwards by graffiti and fly-tipping. How on earth does this square with the narrative about Stoke being a ‘city on the up’ trumpeted by council leader Abi Brown at every opportunity?

To any objective understanding it simply doesn’t and never can do so. The message, again maybe partially inadvertently, sent is that Stoke-on-Trent it a city that doesn’t care about itself. Given that we are in a constant battle with our own inferiority complex and the lazy preconceptions of metropolitan outsiders that can only ever be disastrous.

You don’t need to be an expert in the dark arts of urban regeneration to know that if potential investors see litter blowing down the pavements of streets that are gridlocked with traffic, they will like as not go elsewhere.

This simple truth seems though to be entirely lost on a council leadership that has been blinded by its adventures in property development to its more mundane responsibilities. All those shiny new hotels and apartment blocks in Hanley are at risk of looking like isolated specks of light in the wider darkness of urban blight.

Not for the first time for the want of the horseshoe of having the common sense to see that they should be moving not scrapping bins the council are risking losing the battle to build a more prosperous future for this city.