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Talking about bin collections … monthly in some areas? I despair.
Swings and roundabouts. Didn't Powys see a 14% increase in recycling rates during the trial? And they're already a long way ahead of the national average (66%, the target for the rest of the UK is 50% by 2020!). The reporting on it made it sound like the council was desperate when I think they should be applauded.
I despair that it isn't more common. I've got relatives in Norway and their normal is 1 small supermarket carrier bag of waste per week for a family!
I’ve got relatives in Norway and their normal is 1 small supermarket carrier bag of waste per week for a family!
But that isn't down to local councils as much as national legislation.
Here every council picks and choses what to recycle... as in some bottles but not the tops (for example).
So there is no way for say national supermarkets to make a universally recyclable bottle even if they wanted to.
In Norway you have the machines you can feed bottles and get money out and these are universal and so only bottles that can be recycled through them are sold.
Really? Mine are collected fortnightly and with my refuse it's a quarter full, that could be reduced further if I made more effort. Do you know if the doorstep food waste collection is nationwide?
One bag a week is good going for a family!
One bag a week is good going for a family!
It's a bit like Scotland, but less developed. So they don't do landfill like we do as that would spoil it.
If it's recyclable they recycle it, if it rots they compost it, if it burns they incinerate it. If you want to throw something out, even a bit a bit of old tupperware, then you have to take it to government run thrift shops in case someone else wants it.
Amber valley paid pay over the odds for a plot of land to build a new super duper leisure centre on. Somebody got their sums wrong and it's now just a stoned up makeshift car park.
@ Reformedfatty, I drive under the Iron bridge twice a day at least. It is a perfect example of council ineptitude. They can’t even organise a couple of road signs to warn drivers!
Chester and Cheshire, Police Hq and police station in city walls, they then closed both down and moved police station to a council estate a mile plus out of city centre, and police hq to windsford about 15 miles, and surprise surprise built themselves a new HQ on the site of tthe old police station with ajoining hotel, became to expensive to run so then partly leased to office users.
City centre council offices closed, tax office closed down,theatre closed and library closed site going to be redeveloped with House of fraser as lead tenant, they went bust, now all empty. Theatre moved to old odeon cinema site along with library, that most residents hate, all at huge cost for conversion.
2 bus and one coach station closed, buses and coaches moved to a costly open sided bus station, with limited capacity to park buses and no side to bus station like a wind tunnel, but a grass roof, thats now half dead.
Huge number of traffic lights on all roundabouts that cause huge congestion from drivers going through on red, when theyre broke, little congestion, cost millions to design and get working, and thy still dont do the job.
Add into this mix the changing funding situation in local government, where project money gets pulled or stalled and skilled staff don’t know if there’ll be another one to move on to, and local councils are always going to struggle to have the depth of experience and skill that the private sector can cultivate
I’m 3yrs and £1m into a £17m project. ‘Someone’ with access to all the information contained on a single line of a spreadsheet has pulled the next 2yrs of funding with the expectation that this can be managed.
Contracts, teams, legal agreements, survey data, planning, everything is now under threat that I’ve carefully managed.
Some of these examples are shocking but it’s a loaded dice for the teams delivering them. 😔
Lots of examples of nonsense from councils here but nothing comes close to Edinburgh
Tram line? a billion pounds for a few miles of tramline that is rubbish as it neither interfaces with trains properly like Manchester and leaves you a walk of a few hundred yards outside the airport that is not under cover. - allthis when we actually already have a trainline that crosses the airport and a great bus service. Its not even the basis for a proper comprehensive tram system being so badly designed and implemented
Stat notice scandal - incredible cover up by the council. cost to the council so far many many millions and cost to Edinburgh residents individually millions more. 16 years I have been in dispute with them. 2 million costs to the council / taxpayer on my building alone.; Don't thy know who they are dealing with? 😉 They will not settle with me because they know I will only accept a fair settlement, they know if they try to impose a settlement I will go to court an they know if it gets to court I will call officers of the council as witnesses and I can prove these officers lied.
Thus all they are doing is kicking it into the long grass until these officers have retired.
The corruption is obvious, the cover up extensive, the costs enormous
Eastbourne and Sovereign Harbour/Tarmac and the EA. SH were supposed to migrate by truck the shingles that built up on the harbour wall in the early 00’s. Massive falling out over something and for years the good people of SH and Norman’s Bay sufferers shingle erosion as the build up wasn’t migrated. Though the good people of SH were paying at least 100 a year each per flat/house towards the non existent migration. I wonder where that went?
Lately SH was going to upgrade and improve the shopping facilities at the Harbour (they’re money) but Eastbourne decided the town centre needed a revamp out of council money and because this will take trade from SH, they’ve apparently shelved plans. Brilliant timing.
We also had a dual carriage way (3miles or so) all built and connected to roads but due to arguments over maintenance ownership it wasn’t used for 2-3 years!
Leeds:
A few years ago, my local leisure centre was getting bit tired (built early 1970s) so the council spent a bit (couple of millionish I think) on a new roof and a total refurbishment, new gym equipment etc. Not a bad job done, and probably reasonable value for money for what they got.
Then a year or two after that, funding came available for 2 x brand new leisure centres - not sure of the exact source, but it had to be spent on building two new leisure centres for whatever reason.
At that time the council was "hung" with a small (2 - 3 member) local interest "party" holding the balance of power. They represented our locality. Anyone care to guess where one of the brand new leisure centres went? Yep, right on top of the newly demolished leisure centre that had just been totally refurbished and re-roofed to give it many years more life..
TJ - mate of mine lives in Lauriston St & does work for the council sent me this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-42096589
Inquiry into why tram project went over budget goes.....
Indeed trailseeker. As I said - the mix of corruption, incompetence, and hubris is a really toxic one. As for the corruption - I have seen emails soliciting bribes. I know of 3 men who worked for the council who became millionaires off the stat notice scandal and who all were retired off rather than prosecuted despite the clear evidence of corruption
Our group is a good way to raising the £450k for a pumptrack.
Planning is impossible. There are 27 documents about the process and not one pulls together all the information you need. So now we've got to wait 6 months, by which time some of the funding will have timed out, to check impact on nesting birds. It’s on established tennis courts surrounded by football pitches. Took 8 weeks for permission to dig holes to check porosity.
It's never nearly have a mill to build a pump track is it!?
No wonder Claudio can travel the world to build them!
Beat the Street - in Swindon where I used to live and now in Torbay
It's an initiative to get kids active with sensors on lamposts and rewards for collecting them all.
But this is England isn't it. So it is mainly used by parents driving their kids to each lampost. Completely counter productive.
Woking council has borrowed half a billion or so, with no repayments starting before thirty years, so they can build a massive tower, and turn the town into Croydon.
More than a massive tower, 7 minimum are planned and estimates go to 15+ to meet the housing criteria and not have anyone building in the back garden of Tory Boys, i.e. restrict development to town centre. Plus it fits in with unelected Ray Morgan's plan to turn Woking into Singapore!
Meanwhile it's still unsure if M&S will really move back in to the new shopping part of the development. Toys'R'Us was part of the original plan but they've gone tits up, and now that car park may be demolished (already demolished the fun spiral ramp). Replaced with new car park? or more likely another tower block (and these blocks don't have enough parking and no new facilities, hospitals, schools etc for them).
The new Hoe Valley School… etc. (However many billion spent on flood defences that still puts my house in a high risk area for insurance – even though it never flooded BEFORE)
Hoe Valley School and the same old faults with it, and then the crap cheapskate crossing on a very busy trunk road where a bridge is really required and guess what?... kids already been run over.
And the flooding. My road gets no flood protection despite flooding and on national news, yet Hoe Valley wasn't getting much publicity about flooding but gets massive flood defence scheme. Why? So they can build houses there. I enquired about my area and it's deemed as not a priority as there aren't enough houses affected (or rather, there isn't a new build scheme affected, so why should the council care if a dozen or more houses get flooded).
Have we done Bury council yet?
one of the few bits of dedicated bike lane in gt Manchester, been there for a good 20yrs - and they dig through it for a f***ing drive through KFC complete with paint to enforce a give way that wasn't there before - a couple of weeks later they put a poster next to it for 'I will if you will' a local scheme to encourage healthy activity...
Prestwich regeneration - they have a design for dedicated bike lanes (that will link to the ones mentioned above) and pedestrian areas to make it safe to use - a few businesses on Bury new rd itself moan and the whole thing is redesigned to incorporate parking spaces. we get painted bike lanes. In a few years time the Beelines design (boardman's vision for walking & cycling) will rip this up and put a dedicated bike lane there.
we have serious lack of housing - Bury want to build on green belt despite there being 7 private golf courses within a 4 mile radius within the existing urban confine (Prestwich, Whitefield, Stand, Unsworth, Blakeley, North Manchester, Manchester and Heaton Park the public one, look on google maps, it would be hilarious if it was't depressing)
Do you know if the doorstep food waste collection is nationwide?
People collect your left over beans?
It's definitely not nationwide. What do they do with it?
Our group is a good way to raising the £450k for a pumptrack
I'm in the wrong business. I could build the bestest pumptrack in the whole wide world for less that a tenth of that (and still make 50% profit).
Our local council has recently merged with another (same thing happened all over Norn Iron) in an effort to streamline and save costs. The amount of money spent on rebranding these new councils was ridiculous (so much so that plans for a trail centre in my local forest were scrapped to pay for ***ing stationery). It's not all bad news though, they have done a great job tarting the crap out of all the local roundabouts - with sculptures, big rocks and flowers.
If it’s recyclable they recycle it
In danger of going a bit off-topic but what is and isn't recyclable is a moot point. Posh Sainsbury's taste the difference meat trays for instance are black because it looks better than white and hides all the blood and juice. They make them black by adding carbon - probably soot extracted from VW emissions. Nothing wrong with that, but the recycling centre uses some sort of visual analysis beam to work out what sort of plastic an item is made of, and the beam doesn't get reflected back enough from black trays. So it's just the automation process that buggers the recycling, not the actual recyclability itself. Crisp packets have metal sprayed on the film which makes the individually recyclable bits too difficult to separate. There aren't that many recycling centres around the country.
The spanking new Woking Sportsbox looks quite nice – I’ve watched it being built from the train to work and back. Nowhere near Woking though.
Be interesting to see how that goes, if the other sports centre’s never made any money. Different focus, I guess.
Anyone know much about that one?
i'm going there tonight with eldest. The YAC are using it whilst the spectrum's being fixed, so interested to see what it's actually like..
Less than 2 miles from Woking town centre, Goldsworth Park, Westfield, Old Woking….. how close do you want it to be?
Yep, fair enough, I looked it up on the map after I posted and it was closer in than I thought it was. Seems like it's further out of town on the train. I was comparing it to the one a few minutes walk from the centre which someone said can't turn a profit. Sounds like a great idea, sharing it with the school. Great for the school, anyway! Hope it goes well. Cheers for the extra info.
Seems like it’s further out of town on the train.
That's because on the train you're into all the lovely green belt with big houses and lots of land, makes it seem like it's miles from civilisation and therefore sacrosanct.
Where really it's almost equidistant between the two biggest population centres in Surrey - combined population >10% of the whole of Surrey.
Makes perfect sense to build more houses there, we have roads, hospitals, schools, railways, etc...... if only it wasn't in someones backyard.
<p>@Perchy is that Wishaw then? Always wondered about that one...</p><p></p><p>@TJ Pretty sure the covered walkways extends out to the trams. Which, incidentally are pulling a profit and are actually on the way to getting the Granton line finished at last. Dalmeny line and Edinburgh Gateway is also much a muchness, fine of you're coming from Fife or the City Centre but otherwise useless from anywhere else in the country. At least trams can bypass Corstorphine. </p><p>But yeah, that project threw a lot of ideas under the bus for want of decent management.</p>
Our pumptrack in Edinburgh was less than that for the track, but there may be other things on the site that cost money.
I could write and essay on how various Welsh councils squandered the money they put up for MTBing 5 years ago, £6m in total, half went to build BPW which is fair enough, the rest was meant to create 100k of new trails shared between Cwmcarn and Afan, in actual fact they used it to build a small glass roof for Afan cafe (it’s about 3x5m and cost a fortune) extend the car park at Cwmcarn (and at the same time make it Pay and Display, used to be free) erect a massive rusty metal MTB rider in the middle of a roadabout down the road.
As for new trails...
Blade - funded by the wind farm people.
Penydd - actually an existing trial and rebuilt by NRW after they had to clear the trees.
Cafal - built after a big protest as Caerphilly council doubted it was needed so close to BPW and actually cancelled the project.
Pedalhounds - another existing unofficial / race only DH track built too far from the nearest accessible uplift point and largely unused - it’s a bit too gnar for a lot of people who ride Cafal and too hard to get to on DH bikes (you’ve got to pretty much ride the entire Cafal XC track). I’d guess on a good weekend, when it’s open, it sees maybe 2-3 rider.
Most recently they were given £160k for Cwmcarn to help with walking trails and MTB trails. For reference (a long time ago) the original DH track cost £80k to build, even with inflation and NRW pitching in your think you’d get a whole new trail yeah? Nope, 3k of MTB trail, some new signs for the walking trails and a ‘Welcome Zone’ whatever that is - perhaps it’s to replace the the new wall / signage they put up at the start of forest drive about a year ago and took down again a few weeks later.
@Perchy is that Wishaw then? Always wondered about that one…
Yep. It’s a cracking track and everyone agrees that it’s a massive success, but if it had been more central in the town it could have been so much more.
Meanwhile, there’s an abandoned red ash football pitch at the sports centre in the middle of town which would have been a perfect spot for a pump track what withthe car park and the cafe and the floodlights.
Cost £250000 according to the council
Ah, Wales and investments in recreation, MTB projects, renovation of the valleys, with EU funding... and then Brexit happens 😉
I give you Sunderlands new bridge. Going from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular.
Wow, the Daily Mail is strong in this thread.
Anybody mentioned Bristol's arena yet?
Last I heard it was going to float above the city suspended from a number of hot air balloons.
Squirrelking - the Edinburgh tram airport bit is exposed to the wind and rain. Why they didn't put another couple of hundred yards of track so it was right next to the terminal in I cannot fathom. So tourists first experience of Edinburgh is to walk a couple of hundred metres exposed to the weather behind a multistory car park. Its really not good.
Amsterdam airport to the trains - just go down an escalator. No need to go outside. Geneva - OK you do go outside for about 10m IIRC then back inside down an escalator to the trains. Edinburgh - walk right to the end of the terminal -go outside then a couple of hundred yards outside with an inadequate part covered walkway to get on a tram from which you cannot get on to a train going south without either two changes or crossing a major road and then walking down another part covered walkway with no disabled access. ant a train west or north - first you have to go east and south for half an hour to change to the train which then spends covers almost the same route again. Couple this with the appauling cycleways criss crossing the tramlines at shallow angles and at one point the cycleway actually runs between th tram tracks!
so much money to have be spent to give such a poor result is dreadful when with a little more thought and care it could have been so much better. Especially given the fact a dozen trains an hour actually cross the airport estate and another dozen are only half a mile away
the granton line is many years from being built if it ever is. Huge issues in actually putting it in place and even thn its rubbish as ther will be no circular link so to get from Granton to the airport ( which is a few miles west of Granton) you will have to firstly go a couple of miles east, then a couple of miles south, only then will you go west. As for profitability - only if you ignore the costs of building it - ie fares are just about covering the running cost but will never ever recoup the building costs nor cover the millions that is going to be paid in compensation to all the cyclists killed and injured by the appalling design of the cycleways
30 years ago councils had surveyors architects and engineers, now we have out sourcing to the private sector. Pile on cuts to services and loss of experienced skilled staff and you end up with staff that procure and manage contracts with every conversation, advice and task billed for with a consultants taxi meter.
Are people who work at councils derided like teachers, as people who can't? Or are they public servants that have a genuine desire to serve communities, children, the elderly, disadvantaged and everyone?
Councils work to the direction of councillors elected by the public. If it is so rotten, then do something about it. Get involved, make a stand and have a voice, that is democratic way. Oh, you prefer just to moan and be apathetic.
Some of these make Aberytwyth’s £16000 rope ‘labyrinth’ look pretty good value.
They turned a bowling green into this, and spend £2500 per year to maintain it.
Tomaso
In the case of Edinburgh its incompetence from the councillors and arrogance from the officers. I know of many issues where the officers are telling lies to the councillors. There is also corruption running right thru the council.
I have given councillors direct proof of lies from officers and soliciting of bribes and nothing has been done about it. The issue being that if the council accept the illegal actions occurred then they cannot recoup the monies from the people who had building work done under stat notice and would have to pay millions back to the people that have been scammed. so they simply deny the illegality happened
the council have hidden evidence of the illegal actions from the police and spend their time attacking the whistleblowers and spend huge sums avoiding any cases getting to court.
Its a toxic mix of arraogance, hubris, incompetence adn corruption. All parties bar the tories and greens are complicit and the greens and tories are a small minority so the cover up continues. Its bigger than Poulson / T Dan smith
tjagain Edin airport is generally run by people who dont want passengers. Its easier for me to drive to Cambridge than fly.
Your right about edin council crime syndicate, i eventually fled the city.
What on earth is that 'rope labyrinth' all about.?
Does it serve any purpose?
Does it serve any purpose?
It was thought up by a local councillor who lives nearby, who wanted to stop kids playing football there.
So it serves a purpose in that respect, as nobody goes there anymore.
I live in Northamptonshire, but that's been mentioned.
My local favourite is an oldie but goodie. Peterborough Regional Pool. Built with the express intent of bringing international swimming competition to the city. They built the pool 1m too short... Just dig it out and extend it a bit you say? Good idea. Bugger! We built the pool on the first floor...
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