Get ready for the rubbish wars

The Mayor wants new powers to deal with London's waste problem - and that has caused the first major break with Downing Street

Published in the Evening Standard

Their troubles seemed to be over. Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone may have their disagreements over foreign policy, but on everything else, the relationship had turned into one of respectful, mutual admiration. Blair warmly endorsed Ken for re-election in 2004, while Ken played the loyal footsoldier for Blair a year later. But Tony Blair did once warn that Ken Livingstone would be a “disaster for London”: they were bound to fall out eventually.

And now they have. The only surprise is that it took so long – and that it should be over rubbish.

Already the mayor has accused the environment secretary and prime ministerial favourite, David Miliband, of spouting “fatuous waffle”, while the government says City Hall is guilty of telling fibs. And the cause of this dissension is, quite literally, trash.

It all comes down to Ken’s demand for a single waste authority, a London-wide body that would be in charge not of collecting our rubbish, but disposing of it. He wants that power included in the Greater London Authority Bill currently grinding its way through parliament. Right now, it’s up to the local boroughs to pick up the trash and get rid of it. Under the mayor’s plan, Barnet, Hackney or Hammersmith would keep sending out the bin-men and operating the dustcarts, but the refuse collected would then be dumped in Ken’s lap. So to speak.

He says it’s necessary because waste disposal is now a strategic matter, like housing or planning or skills – areas in which the government has happily given the mayor city-wide powers. In an era of rapid climate change, he argues, rubbish is just too important to be dealt with in a haphazard, borough-by-borough way: we need a gameplan for the whole capital.

What’s trash got to do with climate change? Plenty, depending on what you do with it. If you dig a whole in the ground and dump it there, it spells disaster: landfill sites give off methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more harmful than CO2. But if you burn it in a giant incinerator, that involves serious carbon emissions and pollution, too. Ken’s got religion on climate change now – and waste is one of the key battlefronts in the battle against it. He thinks London needs to get to grips with the problem strategically, as a single city. And that means under him.

It’s not just greenery either; there’s a financial incentive here, too. Britain is now bound by targets set by the European Union: if we don’t curb our landfill habit by 2010, there could be up to £180m a year to pay in EU fines. Those would be passed onto the councils who had failed to do their bit, passed on in turn to you and me, in the form of higher council tax bills.

The government, despite the protests of a group of London MPs, is unmoved. It is blocking what it sees as a typical Ken power-grab, leaving the two sides locked in an increasingly bitter stalemate. The other day Ken branded Miliband “the carbon kid” for refusing to do what’s needed in the fight against global warming. The environment secretary refutes that, agreeing that London needs to do more to re-use our rubbish, to recycle it, to extract energy from it – using new technology that captures the heat generated by burning garbage, for example – but he trusts the boroughs to do the job.

For one thing, says Miliband, it’s bonkers to separate the collection and disposal of waste: the tasks go together. (Think of the lunacy of separating track from trains in the running of the railways.) Either Ken should run both, which he is not proposing, or the boroughs should stay in charge. The mayor’s “halfway house” plan could, says Miliband, end up as the worst of both worlds. Besides, the minister recently visited Mumbai, a city of 18m people: there he was told that it’s best to decentralise waste disposal, not centralise it, because changing people’s recycling habits is a job that has to be done ultra-locally.

Who’s right? When we’re piling up the most colossal amount of junk – every hour Britons throw away enough rubbish to fill the Albert Hall – who should be responsible for getting rid of it? I’d like to go along with Miliband and believe that the boroughs could do all that needs to be done. After all, the mayoralty was meant to draw power down from above, not gobble it up from below.

The trouble is the facts seem to fall on Ken’s side. London is badly lagging behind, recycling just 21% of our household waste while the likes of Berlin manage 40%, and several leading American cities hit 50%. If the boroughs are really capable of turning that around, of burying less rubbish in landfill, recycling more and finding new, carbon-light, methods of disposal, then why have they not done it already? Ken can boast a track record of success when it comes to taking on other big, city-wide problems: surely it makes sense to give him a chance to solve this one.

So let’s agree that on the substance of this argument, which even government insiders describe as finely balanced, Ken comes out ahead. The same cannot be said of his style. Street-fighter that he is, he’s gone in with his fists up against two enemies at once: the boroughs below and the government above, hurling insults at anyone standing in his way. It makes for great theatre, as ever, but close observers of London politics offer a warning from history.

They note that whenever the London-wide authority has gone too far, asserted itself too aggressively, it’s ended up abolished, usually after the boroughs have persuading a Conservative government to do the abolishing. It happened to the Metropolitan Board of Works, the London County Counci and the Greater London Council.

No one knows that better than Ken Livingstone. So perhaps he should tread lightly, even when he has right on his side. Otherwise his beloved City Hall could join all its predecessors – in the dustbin of history.

Posted on February 1, 2007 11:04 AM

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