How much of your council tax gets wasted on waste?

Last year, tax-payers in England and Wales forked out £4.55bn on waste disposal, which could be better spent elsewhere
When I got this year's council tax bill from Southwark council, I glanced at their budget and noticed something extraordinary. The council was spending £32.5m on waste collection and disposal (if you include capital expenditure). But what really astonished me was when I compared this to the borough's total council tax bill of £86.4m. An astonishing 37% of my council tax was being spent on waste collection and disposal. What an enormous, ridiculous waste of money, which could be far better spent on elderly people, education or cutting the borough's carbon emissions.
This got me wondering what the story was nationally. After a bit of detective work with the help of the Audit Commission, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) and the Welsh assembly, I finally tracked down the relevant figures. No one had ever asked before for a comparison of council spending on waste with total council tax collected.
The statistics revealed that in England and Wales last year, our councils spent a whopping £4.546bn on waste collection and disposal, out of a total council tax collection of £25.7bn – or 18 pence for every pound of council tax income. The English district councils are even worse, spending nearly one in three pounds of council tax revenue on dealing with rubbish.
Here's a short list of some of the other high waste spenders, but you can access the full list via our datablog:
Aylesbury Vale: 36%Berwick-on-Tweed: 37%Cambridge: 43%Chester: 32%North East Derbyshire: 31%
Of course, local councils don't get their funding only from council tax. Government grants and other funding top the pot up to around £107bn, but of this total three-quarters is taken up by education, social care and police.
Angered by how much damage our bin culture was doing to my pocket, I wanted to know what councils were doing to avoid these huge costs in the first place. After all, they are always banging on about the so-called waste hierarchy: reduce comes before re-use comes recycle and ncineration and finally landfill.
When I tracked down the figures, thanks again to the helpful statisticians at Cipfa, it turned out that just £43m goes into reducing the amount of rubbish in the first place across all English and Welsh councils. The Audit Commission's report on waste disposal, entitled Well Disposed, stated that councils feel they have little control over the amount of waste being produced locally. The commission predicted total municipal waste would continue to rise at about 1% per annum until 2020. Talk about a disempowered political class.
The same report found that 75% of councils do not encourage the use of mail preference services to cut down junk mail, 62% do not work with the private sector to reduce waste, 30% provided no waste reduction education for their public and 30% failed to promote re-use services.
Nearly all the effort over the past decade has been about avoiding landfill. So councils have focused on waste incineration and recycling, both of which provide huge revenue streams for major corporations. Many of these waste disposal contracts last for up to 20 years, with some totalling over £4bn of tax-payers' money.
What they should be doing instead is devising contracts like California did with their electricity companies, whereby the contractors were rewarded for lowering demand in the first place. They should also be fostering grassroots initiatives like Freecycle and the Real Nappy Campaign. We need a vision of zero-waste communities, not a hugely expensive full-scale switchover to incineration and recycling.
So have a look at the accompanying data blog on English councils and calculate what percentage of your council tax is being wasted on waste-disposal. Then get working on letting local people know. Write to your local paper and councillors and demand action on waste reduction. We must reduce this shocking amount of money and carbon being wasted on waste.
• Donnachadh McCarthy is the founder of national Carbon Footprint day.