We don’t have much of a choice on these extra taxes.Although the government’s plan to ‘wean England off its landfills’ is being touted as a lovely green initiative, it’s actually a tactic to help us comply with the EU's Landfill Directive and avoid the fines the directive will slap us with. The costs of this are being passed onto individual households.What extra costs are these then? The Institution of Civil Engineers says the UK needs £10 billion just to build the new infrastructure. According to a director of Biffa (Biffa collects the waste of 50 British local authorities), EU recycling laws and landfill taxes will then cost anything up to £8 billion a year. To repeat - up to £10 billion in initial infrastructure costs, plus an additional £8 billion a year to run things (by way of comparison, the annual £8bn cost alone is equivalent to about 8% of this year’s NHS budget). This directive will therefore massively increase the costs of refuse collection. As a result, government and local councils are looking to shift these costs to individual households. -------While the move away from burying our waste in the ground may or may not be a good thing, there’s a fundamental dishonesty at the centre of this. While the media and chattering classes willingly report David Miliband’s view that it is "time for everyone to change their behaviour”, they don’t address the wider fact that Miliband is trying to meet EU targets and, in the process, avoid fines for failure. The impetus then is coming from the EU, not the government. The silence on this wider EU context speaks volumes.
Fraser Pearce ● 6577d