Cheshire East refuses to re-think plans on £56 green waste charge

The Conservatives requested the matter be ‘called-in’ so it could be discussed again at full council, arguing viable alternatives were not considered.

But the request was refused, with the council saying the original decision to charge for green waste was made at February’s budget meeting and ‘there can be no challenge to the full council decision’.

This means the charge, which is the highest in the north west, will go ahead and anyone wanting their garden waste collected from January will have to pay.

The Tories are furious because they have complained at numerous committee meetings they had no input in the budget process because it was presented to them as a ‘fait accompli’.

Cllr Janet Clowes (Image: Cheshire East Council)

Conservative group leader Janet Clowes has now issued a statement saying: “The council’s refusal to re-visit this decision is based on February’s MTFS budget decision suggesting that such decisions are ‘set in stone’.

"Yet we know decisions made at the same council meeting about library opening hours, have already been re-worked and local authorities, like any other business, must constantly re-model their fiscal planning to meet changing circumstances and priorities.”

Cheshire East officers held a behind-closed-doors meeting last week with councillors who had requested the call-in.

Cllr Clowes said: “The debate and fiscal data provided at last week’s meeting was valuable, but it should have been available to both the environment and communities committee members and other interested councillors before the budget consultation in January, when members would have been able to proactively inform policy.”

Knutsford councillor Tony Dean (Con), a member of the environment and communities committee, said: “The green bin charge was presented as a ‘fait accompli’,  having been decided by a small group who put together the draft MTFS earlier in 2023.

Cllr Tony Dean (Image: Cheshire East Council)

"At no time was the environment and communities committee invited to contribute or help develop this policy prior to the draft MTFS being presented ‘for noting only’ at the January 2023 meeting.”

Labour, meanwhile, has released a statement arguing the scheme had been debated at length at the relevant committee meeting and the Conservative statement that a ‘small group’ had taken the decision on garden waste was ‘patently false as the decision was taken by a vote at full council in February 2023, where the Conservatives voted against a balanced budget’.

Council leader Sam Corcoran (Lab) said: “The Conservatives based their rejected call-in on ‘viable alternatives’ that had not been considered but were unable to say what these ‘oven-ready’ alternatives were.

Cllr Sam Corcoran (Image: Cheshire East Council)

“The monitoring officer found that there had been extensive consultation around the budget and the business case put forward for garden waste charges. There were also two separate opportunities given to all committees to input into the budget. The Conservatives spurned all such opportunities.”

He added: “Cheshire East Council does now have a fully balanced four-year budget, something never achieved under the Conservatives, and the days of budgets with ‘unachievable savings’ are long gone.

"Cheshire East Council now has leadership that is willing to take difficult decisions to raise extra revenue to keep services going after the Conservative government crashed the economy.”