Coventry City Residents Rubbish Councils Wheelie Bin Leaflet

Coventry City Council has this week become the latest city council to upset local residents over the collection of wheelie bins.

The city council distributed thousands of leaflets across the Hillfields and Foleshill areas of Coventry giving instructions to residents on how to leave their bins out for collection.

This was a result of the scaremongering by health and safety anoraks who suggested that binmen could potentially injure themselves if they were to collect bins that were facing the wrong way, with the handles at the back.

The leaflet has come under attack from the infamous Taxpayers Alliance. Jonathan Isaby of the Alliance said: “When money is tight for families and local authorities alike, the council should not be wasting money on this sort of pointless exercise.”

The leaflets cost an astounding £227 to print up not to mention the cost of designing and delivering the leaflets. Now Coventry has a population of around 317,000, of which a third might have to stump up for council tax, resulting in an eye watering cost of £0.0007 per person. It’s no surprise that with costs such as these that the Taxpayers Alliance are up in arms.

A resident of Coventry, Dave Evans, made a far more pertinent point when he suggested to the Coventry Telegraph that: “If this is a health and safety issue why has it only been raised now and, if so, is it not a health and safety issue to the residents?...Shall I get Tuesdays off work and load my own bins?” Well Dave, Woody wouldn’t advise you take time off work to do that but you do make an important point. This leaflet does have the aroma of a council trying to protect its interests in the event that a council binmen is injured and decides to sue because of incorrect positioning by the homeowner.

Andrew Walster, from the city services department said that: “If we have 200 bins the wrong way around on a street we reintroduce the manual handling aspect of bin collection and we could have lots of people with musculoskeletal problems.”  Now obviously we don’t want binmen pulling muscles left, right and centre, but anyone with a little common sense can surely see that the “manual handling” aspect of bin collection has never been lost, and could never be lost, at least not until we have introduced the drone wheelie bin, operated within the dark recesses of town halls up and down the country.

Woody certainly feels that if binmen returned the wheelie bins back to where they got them from, then residents might be more inclined to ensure they are facing the correct way when they are due for collection. Perhaps residents might like to club together to raise money for their own leaflet to distribute amongst binmen explaining how to return wheelie bins back to their correct location.

www.getwheeliebins.co.uk