Bullying Bureaucrats In The Town Hall Need To Be Brought To Heel

Man prepared to go to court over £500 fine for putting rubbish next to wheelie bin

Ben Riley, 28, left four black bags next to his own bin on 3 January outside his back garden gate in Ipswich, Suffolk, after getting mixed up with the collection dates

by Ross McGuinness, Yahoo News

Ben Riley says he is prepared to go to court after being fined for leaving rubbish bags next to his wheelie bin. (SWNS) (Newsquest / SWNS)

A man who was fined £500 for putting rubbish bags next to his wheelie bin has said he would rather go to court than pay up.

Ben Riley, 28, left four black bags next to his own bin on 3 January outside his back garden gate in Ipswich, Suffolk, after getting mixed up with the collection dates.

The rubbish wasn’t due to be collected for another six days and his blue bin was full.

On 13 February, the father of one received a fixed penalty notice for putting the black bags next to his bin.

He appealed the £500 fine but was told it had been rejected last Thursday, and while Ipswich Borough Council have now extended the early payment period and reduced the fine to £250, Riley says he would rather go to court than pay.

Ben Riley was fined for leaving bin bags of rubbish next to a wheelie bin. (SWNS) (Newsquest / SWNS)

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Council introduces half-size rubbish bins. No problem, residents tell Boggart Blog

Lambeth Council in south London is to introduces half-size rubbish bins to encourage residents to throw less out. The council council has approved plans to introduce rubbish bins that are half the normal size to encourage people to produce less waste.

The common 240-litre containers will be replaced with 140-litre bins, which campaigners say are far too small for an average family’s weekly refuse.

It is thought that any extra rubbish Including homeless people) found besides the smaller bins will not be collected.

Boggart Blog’s reporter on the streets of London asked a random selection of residents what they thought of the plan. The people who responded, council tax payers named Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful and Doc assures us the move would not give them a problem.

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Up to her ankles in shit – from the neck down

A four month search for a missing woman in the US had ended after she was found buried under piles of rubbish at her home. Billie Jean James was found by her husband who had been living in the same house as his wife’s corpse. He spotted one of her feet sticking out from underneath the mountain of rubbish and clutter that littered their Las Vegas home.

Friends said Mrs James was compulsive hoarder who spent her weekends buying goods at car boot sales. She also frequented thrift shops and refused to allow anyone into her house because he was so ashamed of the mess.

Police had searched the house several times while looking for the 67-year-old who was known to be a compulsive hoarder.

Sniffer dogs had been sent into the property but were unable to locate the body amid floor to ceiling piles of clothes, rubbish, empty food boxes and other goods that Mrs James had stored. Officials believe rotting food and other pungent smells stopped the dogs from working properly.

Now let’s not go all “Only In America” on this one. Anyone who has seen a Kim and Aggie the supercleaners show knows we’ve some dirty fuckers in Britain too.

What I think we can safely say on this one is Billy-Jean and hubby
Tommy-Ray-Jim-Bob-Joe did not have the closest of relationships. Although how they managed to stay awat from each other in a house so full of shit there wasn’t room to turn round is a mystery.

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Serial Hoarder Found Buried Under Rubbish At Home

Pity The Poor Binmen

Are you being unfair to binmen? Do you expect the poor delicate mites to lift things occasionally? How insensitive of you is that?

Once upon a time, binmen were big burly blokes with names like Bert Strongitharm and Fred Spitmuscle, they would cheerfully hoist your metal bin, full of all kinds of rubbish but fitted with convenient handles, onto their broad backs, carry it down the garden path and dump it in the lorry. They did not care what people put in their bins and neither did the councils.
Then came the plague of politicians with comedy accents (Thatcher) and comedy ears (Blair) who talked of change, modernisation and moving forward to meet the future. And suddenly collections of rubbish changed from regular as clockwork to “we’ll shift it when we shift it OK?”
Suddenly binmen were not moving forward to meet anything, especially the bin wagon.
Part of the problem was that councils modernised by switching from nice round bins with convenient handles to wheelie bins that were square, tall and handleless, a shape that can only easily be lifted by a deformed giant.
The councils however spent lots of our money on lorries fitted with lifting gearxxx sorry strike that, the councils spend loads of money contracting out refuse collection services to expensive private companies who hired cheap lorries from refusetrucksRus.com. Then they contracted out the administration of refuse collection to penpushersRus.com. Then they went crazy for recycling, contracting out the supervision of rubbish sorting to jobsworthsRus.com.
And then they contracted out the messy, heavy lifting part of the job to volunteer labour. Us. No matter who we were, we have been tasked with lifting two plastic containers, one for: week1 – glass; week 2 – tins ; the other for: week1 – paper and card ; week 2 – plastics.

Paper and glass care heavy, wheelie bins are tall, it’s a difficult lift for an average sized man. For a little old lady its impossible. but little old lady or big burly bloke you volunteer to do the lifting and carry your rubbish in its correct containers to the edge of the pavement so the domestic waste recycling operatives can get the lifting gear on it without having to strain themselves.

But who is to blame for the problem. Is it the bolshie binpersons and their bloody minded union leaders? No!
Is it the designers who created such awkward receptacles? No!
Is it the local authority managers who introduced these systems without thinking them through? No!
Well is it Henry the mild mannered janitor – dammit how did Hong Kong Fooey get into this blog? No, the responsible party is YOU the punter.

If you are not willing to lift your impossibly awkward containers full of heavy rubbish for the convenience of the binpersons you don’t deserve to have a nice environment. And if you put rubbish in the wrong colour bin, or do not put the lid down properly, or do not leave your bin close enough to the edge of the kerb, you deserve to be hit with a heavy fine. And the council’s jobsworth army of inspectors will make sure you are.

Being small, old, ill or disabled is no excuse. Some people have the attitude that public services exist for the benefit of the citizen. Such anarchistic and sociopathic ideas must be stamped out.