Letter: Blood boiling over NFDC bins plans

I have been a regular reader of the Advertiser for over 50 years. You are always at the forefront of news and have a knack of raising blood pressure early on a Friday morning!

Last Friday’s page 5 did just that, wheelie bins again! I cannot be “educated” that this move is all about recycling, to my mind it is purely financial, and to raise yet more funds the public are facing fines.

Get the authority to firstly publish how much money are “we” going to pay upfront for all these various wheelie bins.

Then say how much an elderly resident is going to be fined for inadvertently putting the wrong item in the wrong bin.

Next, the garden refuse bins. At present I pay for two green bags at slightly less than is going to be the fee for a garden bin. These bags, with grass cuttings etc are rather heavy. Are the equivalent two bags in a wheelie bin going to be too heavy for the operatives to handle, you bet!

Next, paper and cardboard in a sack! Hope they are waterproof or else another soggy mess.

Next, ratepayers are going to be fined for leaving the bins on the public highway. I know from practical experience when handing developments over for adoption to the local authority that the pavement/footpath constitutes part of the public highway. If all residents are out at work all day, are they to be fined?

I trust the Advertiser will monitor this situation over the next five years and publish the forecast percentage increase in recycling rates, it should be interesting.

I am going to have to spend not an inconsiderable sum, modifying our side access gate and cutting back well-established shrubbery to accommodate these monstrosities.

Finally, I had to check it was not April the 1st.

The projects and performance manager stated: “There would also be advice as to promoting the use of reusable nappies”.

Not a hope in a million years!

I remember when our children were young, buckets of Milton steriliser, washing machine on every day, a second-hand twin tub, dried on a clothes horse in front of embers of a coal fire, open the windows to prevent condensation. Do not expect parents in 2023 to go back to those conditions.

It is all very sad that within a couple of years our pleasant town will resemble Southampton, Portsmouth, Coventry and Birmingham, a total blight on our street scene.

Give me a couple of years and I will supply photographs to our so-called councillors to prove my point.

C. Moore

New Milton