11:00am Friday 25th January 2013
THE idea that Worcestershire County Council can cut 200 jobs, with possibly more planned as the figures for so-called savings continue to rise, but then still go ahead with spending hundreds of millions on an incinerator that is not needed, as there is just not enough rubbish, is absolute madness.
How many more people must lose their jobs while ring-fencing a project that is likely to cost us all over £1 billion in its lifetime, and will see a private business make hundreds of millions in profits at our expense.
Spending so much money at a time when our young and the most vulnerable in society are seeing cuts to the services they depend on shows just how foolhardy those county councillors who support the building of the incinerator are.
It makes no sense at all to be committing the taxpayer to such a large debt over such a long time when there are much better ways to deal with rubbish, and which could also create more jobs and improve our recycling rates.
Incinerators will actually have a damaging effect on recycling rates as rubbish will be needed for the incinerator and so less will be recycled, and some that could be recycled will be burned instead.
So to combat this there will probably be a levy similar to the landfill tax brought in, which means the argument that we need to build an incinerator because of rising EU landfill costs will be nullified as the costs to incinerate will also be increasing very soon. So it’s a bad deal all round.
We need to concentrate on bringing in newer cheaper technologies that can be invested in, and actually increase our recycling rates, and create jobs for people from them at the same time.
But the county council appear to be very short-sighted and have got us into a very costly deal which will burden taxpayers for decades, with no real cost or environmental benefits to anyone.
This is the council just looking for an easy one-size fits all solution, which will simply burn our money away.
MICHAEL WRENCH Parliamentary Spokesman UKIP Wyre Forest
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