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News and Comment October 2011

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7 October (Part 1) - Refuse to accept their rubbish figures

Cost of rubbish disposalA reader from Bromley has pointed out that the cost of refuse collections table published a couple of days ago doesn’t add up. Nothing in Bexley quite adds up but I should have noticed. Adding the rows sideways, two rows tally and two don’t, though I accept that one is probably a mistype. I still think the whole thing is an arithmetical fiddle. If I decide to get rid of the unwatched box set of DVDs given to me last Christmas by sending them to a friend as a birthday present it might cost me £2 to take the bus to the Post Office (the collection cost) and £10 to have them take the parcel away (the disposal cost).

If I decide a better idea is to recycle the DVDs through ebay for £20 and deliver the package in my own car using £5’s worth of petrol I will have made £15. I won’t have made £15 plus the £12 I might otherwise have spent disposing of the discs according to the original plan. Yet this is exactly the flawed logic that Bexley council employ in their accounting for refuse disposal costs - and then cannot even add the fiddled numbers correctly.

£3 million saved last year - yeah, right!

 

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