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