How Far Do You Have To Go To Get Rid Of Your Household Waste?

Following the unplanned partial or complete closures of more than half of the county's household waste sites over the first sunny weekend of the year, the ruling Conservative administration displayed breathtaking complacency when challenged at a meeting of the County Council.

Hertfordshire Tories thought it was acceptable that people should have been turned away. One even boasted how he had taken rubbish to Ware, found a big queue causing a potential traffic hazard, and so drove all the way to the Stevenage site where he also had to queue.

"It seems they have a cavalier approach to running the waste sites." said County Councillor Sandy Walkington, Liberal Democrat Environment spokesperson. "Those occasional users who come out at weekends, if they think waste sites are going to be closed, of course they're not going to drive to an entirely different town, they will simply find other ways to dispose of their rubbish.

"We were even more dumb-founded when they said it was wholly inappropriate to raise this issue in the middle of the procurement for the new service, With their objective of slashing £750 thousand from the budget, you would have thought they would want to highlight to the tenderers the problems seen over that weekend and ask that they address such peak-time capacity challenges in their bid.

"But as ever the Conservative administration at County Hall is all about self congratulation and not about a decent service to hard-pressed council tax payers," Sandy concluded.

Liberal Democrat councillor Malcolm Cowan added, "It appears we are not only affected by frost and rain destroying our poorly-maintained roads, we now have to worry about the wrong type of sunshine shutting the waste sites and causing hazardous queues on our roads"