Tuesday 9 October 2007

Gardeners' Question Time and Council Funding

Not normally found together in the same sentence, I fully admit.

I quite enjoy listening to Gardeners' Question Time on Radio 4.  Invariably their are questions asked that apply equally to my own gardening experience.

I was listening last week and heard a question from a member of the audience in Durham about what to do with the plastic plant pots she obtained from the garden centre when buying new plants.  She complained that her local authority, Durham City Council, did not offer a plastic recycling service and wanted some ideas from the panel as to other uses to which the pots could be put.

The panel comprised members who mostly lived in the South and expressed surprise that Durham didn't offer a plastic recylcing services as all their local councils did.

It dawned on me that this is a symptom of the imbalance in funding for local government which we suffer from so severely here in Dorset.

Presumably, Durham City Council don't have the same cost pressures that our local councils do and therfore have not been 'encouraged' to bring in a wider recycling scheme to cut their land fill waste.  The logical conclusion must therefore be that not only is the Government's financial settlement for local authorities unfair, it's also not very green.