News from Murad Qureshi: Mayor's Business Waste Strategy rubbish for small business

Labour Assembly Member Murad Qureshi has criticized the Mayor’s recently published Business Waste Strategy for failing to prioritize access to more local authority run waste facilities by small and medium sized businesses.

Labour’s environment spokesman Murad Qureshi AM said:  “The Mayor’s strategy recognizes that business waste is predominantly collected and managed privately by waste contractors, it also mentions the escalating cost of landfill tax, but it fails to effectively link the waste stream from small business to the infrastructure which already exists for household recycling.  The strategy should do much more to enable small and medium sized businesses with fewer resources to access suitable waste and recycling services in their local area”

Small businesses are often seen as commercially less attractive by the private waste/recycling sector because of the relatively small quantities of waste they produce, and therefore they often have to pay a disproportionately higher amount for waste disposal.

Research carried out by the Federation of Small Businesses supports the view that small businesses find it extremely difficult to access suitable waste and recycling services. Many local authorities do not offer these services to businesses. They call for small businesses to be allowed to use Household Waste and Recycling Centres in their areas. This could be implemented quickly and would provide small firms with greater access to waste and recycling services.  In fact from the figures available showing the number of business served with waste collections by their local authority, on average, only 18% of businesses benefit from waste collection services in their area.  In Hounslow, it is less than 3%, Westminster less than 4% and Greenwich 8%.

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Under the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS) councils face tough allowances for the amount of Biodegradable Municipal Waste (BMW) they are able to send to landfill and even tougher penalties for not meeting these targets.  Waste collected from small businesses by a local authority is classed as BMW and counts towards its LATS allowance.  Since local authorities face severe financial penalties if they exceed their LATS allowance the scheme acts a strong incentive not to offer business waste collection services or to offer such a service at a price that is deliberately uncompetitive. The Government’s Review of Waste Policy in England 2011 proposes an abolition of LATS from 2013.

The level of service, frequency and charges imposed on small businesses by their local council for commercial waste services vary tremendously from borough to borough with Brent and Kingston offering no commercial waste collection service and no commercial waste being accepted at reuse and recycling centres in the borough.

In Ken Livingstone’s Business Waste Management Strategy “Making Waste work in London” – Out of 34 proposals listed (page 136 of the draft), 5 are action points to be implemented exclusively by local authorities (Action points 5, 10, 11, 25 and 31).  In comparison, the current strategy identifies no action points exclusively for local authorities out of a total of 33.

Murad Qureshi is a London-wide Assembly Member, Labour Assembly’s environment spokesperson and Chair of the London Assembly’s Environment Committee

For further information please contact Nikki Salih on 0207 983 4400