In his latest election leaflet, Mr Ali seems to be having difficulty remembering what has been the work of his red nest colleagues.

The Tories have introduced a waste and re-cycling scheme that has failed to address the needs of Central’s multiple-occupancy homes. After over a year of campaigning for recognition of this problem your local labour councillors have an agreement that a specialist waste warden will visit the multiple-occupancy homes.

Whilst not disputing the failings of the waste collection scheme, I could have sworn their had been others more active on this issue.

Swindon needs a road system to match the Labour Governments town regeneration project.

Strange… as I recall, one of the main features of the town centre regeneration planning has been the unwillingness of the government to contribute to improving transport infrastructure.

The Tories solution is to narrow key roads and increase traffic volumes on Central’s residential streets.

Err… that’s the canal that is part of the regeneration plan is it? Who did you claim that project for? Being a bit selective in what you claim as your own perhaps? Lets not forget either that the impact of the canal on traffic is much more complex than Mr Ali and his colleagues would have us believe. Yes it would increase traffic at the Broadgreen end of Central ward, but traffic at the Kingshill end would be decreased. He also seems confused over schooling.

They have also failed to… provide sufficient local primary education, forcing parents and children to undertake unnecessary costly journeys.

Yet on the red nest’s website he says something different.

I am proud of Labour’s huge investment in new schools.

Contradictions like this hardly give an impression of a reliable, trustworthy person.

It’s nice that Mr Ali alone among this year’s election candidates has made any attempt at communication in the run-up to the election. It’s unfortunate that so much of that communication is untrue.

Now both the main parties are at it. Just a few days after the red nest brought in yet another minister to meet and greet in the town, now the blue nest have brought in a shadow minister, again to meet and greet, in Parks ward where most of the ministerial visitors have spent most of their visits.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned but, when deciding which candidate to vote for in the council elections, I couldn’t care less what ministers and their shadows have to say. This is a local election, not a national one, and, for once, there are quite a few local issues to be debated, such as waste and recycling services, town centre regeneration, and the canal proposals.

It seems that the parties are so busy showing their parliamentary colleagues around Parks ward that so far they’ve had little time to enter the local debate on the doorstep in the rest of the borough. If parties concentrate campaigning effort on ‘key’ marginal wards and take the elctorate elsewhere for granted, they shouldn’t be surprised if the result is voter apathy.

Yesterday I received a letter through the post from Ms Snelgrove. Not the most local affair, having been printed in London and with a return address on the envelope in Newcastle upon Tyne. Apparently, she’s had an

Action Team in Central to listen to your concerns about anti-social behaviour and the mounting rubbish on your streets.

The letter even solicits for volunteers to her ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’. Ms Snelgrove seems not to realise that listening is not itself action. Even if it were, her ‘team’ have been most noticeable by their absence. The rubbish is now subsiding, especially since the council started putting little orange ‘Council aware’ labels on bags of rubbish left for days on the streets. The rubbish was ‘mounting’ on the streets several months ago, when Ms Snelgrove’s ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’ didn’t even exist… not that there’s any evidence it exists at all. There’s no evidence of in on the local red nest’s website, nor on Ms Snelgrove’s.

The only things that are mounting now are the local election campaigns… and Ms Snelgrove’s hypocrisy. Real action speaks much louder than words.

I’m not overly interested in what the reasons may be for Mr Wren’s decision to prematurely leave his post as cabinet member for local environment on Swindon Borough Council. (Whatever the reason, I’m sure any formal announcement will include an attempt at humour of the ‘following the successful introduction of borough-wide kerbside recycling…’ variety.) Let’s just hope that his proposed successor, Mr Mattock starts with a little humility by admitting that the introduction of wheelie bins and blue bags for non-recyclable waste has poorly implemented.

The first step to improving services is admitting that they are not as good as they could, or should, be. The first step to learning how to make those improvements is admitting that mistakes were made.

With a little flurry of leaflets (three in fact) from our local blue egg, it seems that the local election campaign is off to an early start. As is traditional in Swindon election leaflets, there’s a couple of photographs of the candidate standing in front of some graffiti tags. (I wonder if the taggers get a buzz from having their handiwork feature in election bumf.) In addition, there are mentions of the canal (nice idea but concerns about the local impact), town centre redevelopment (though I’m not quite sure why Central will be the ‘envy of the rest of Swindon’ when the vast majority of the development is in Eastcott), an invitation to sign a petition against post office closures (which is a little late seeing as the consultation period has just ended) and an oh-so-toned-down comment about the problems with waste collections.

I’m sure if I just replaced the photographs and the colour of the ink, I’d get a close approximation of the leaflets I’ll be getting from the other parties over the coming months.

I’m not sure what Mr Glaholm is on, but it is clearly strong stuff. His suggestion on how to solve the problems with waste and recycling collections is pure fantasy.

I think what we need now is for Anne Snelgrove to call for a public meeting on this. She’s the one person with the connections that could make it happen and who could be viewed as independent by both sides.

There are many things Ms Snelgrove may be but, as her ignominious voting record in the House of Commons and her many partisan interventions in local politics show, she is neither independent nor seen as such. She’s already had her say on this topic, and it was little more than a party-political jibe.

Mr Glaholm’s other thought on this subject, that the change in waste and recycling collections would have been much more successful if done area by area is also based on an assumption which, for this council, is just plain wrong.

When I was on that working party I suggested that rather than a blanket roll-out we should do it slowly, but I was told the council had the bins in West Swindon and knew what would happen. But it was a mistake. Rolling out everywhere at the same time meant that we learned as we went along – instead of looking at areas where we could learn from best practice.

The evidence so far is that the council has no interest in learning anything from its mistakes and prefers to flatly deny that any mistakes were made.

With it being less than a month since Swindon Borough Council introduced weekly kerbside recycling, it’s far too early to draw conclusions as to its impact… unless you’re Ms Snelgrove that is. We can, as always, rely on Ms Snelgrove to jump in with a bit of cheap political point scoring.

Figures I have seen have Swindon Council’s recycling and composting rate at 32 per cent, and it is excellent that they are doing what they are doing. But when you look at Wiltshire County Council it is recycling 38 per cent of the waste it collects. So although it looks like we’re doing okay what we need to be doing is exceeding our targets. MPs need to keep the pressure on our councils so that they beat their targets quickly and we can all reduce our carbon footprints.

Recycling is about re-use of materials; reducing carbon footprint is about reducing energy consumption. Ms Snelgrove isn’t the first to assume the two are inextricably linked, but for her to restate it does highlight her ignorance of the issues.

Mr Bluh, leading the defence for the council, has, presumably, seen some more up-to-date figures than Ms Snelgrove has.

We’ve already achieved 38 per cent currently, and that will climb once the new service has settled down.

You may also recall Ms Snelgrove’s previous statement that she always puts the concerns of her electorate first. Compare and contrast.

Ms Snelgrove:

One of the big problems we have in this town is that the main recycling point we have is in the northern part of the borough. I think we need a new facility in the south of the borough. It could be a one-off capital project. Once up and running it would not cost too much to maintain and it would make a huge difference to the amount we recycle. We all know the council is receiving a fair amount of cash from building works – I cannot think of a better issue to put money into.

Mr Bluh:

All the changes we’ve made this year have cost the council an extra £2m to introduce, yet we’ve had no financial assistance from the Government to do it…. When we consulted residents about what they thought our priorities for waste should be, they placed a comprehensive kerbside recycling service for the whole borough, including plastic bottles, above a second waste site. We’ve now delivered that.

I suppose it should come as no surprise really that Ms Snelgrove is trying to spend more of our money and would no doubt be the first to complain if council tax had to rise to deliver her plans. That said, there couldn’t be a more apt monument to Ms Snelgrove than a centre for collecting and recycling rubbish. I trust she’ll be at the front of the queue when it opens, with copies of most of her press statements and parliamentary speaches.

The introduction of the new recycling service may have been incompetent, but in picking her latest target for petty political point scoring, Ms Snelgrove has totally missed the main concerns of her electorate.

In all the arguments over whether central Swindon should or should not have wheelie bins, one issue seems to have been consistently overlooked. As seen again in the council’s response to the latest protests in the Broadgreen area, the only concern seems to be whether wheelie bins can be fitted into the space in front of the houses. They do not seem to be thinking about how much slower the collections in central Swindon might become with wheelie bins.

At the moment, the dustmen can quickly and easily hoist a black bag straight over my front wall, without coming in through the gate. It takes no more than a couple of seconds. Come November they’ll have to come through my (sprung) gate, manœuvre the bin out through the gate (which by now will have closed), between the parked cars to the dustcart. Then repeat the action in reverse once the bin is empty. In the more spacious suburbs, where the manœuvring will be much easier, this might be quite quick. In the Victorian terraces it will not. I get the impression that nobody has thought at all about how much more this will cost in time and hence money.

Given how bad a mess the council has been making of the the changes to its waste and recycling service, it is, perhaps, not surprising that they have received a one star rating for them in an Audit Commission report on Swindon’s waste management services. The report notes the dissatisfaction of residents.

The waste collection service is variable with different parts of the Borough receiving different services and there are low levels of residents’ satisfaction with recycling and waste collection.

Just how low is only apparent from page 16 of the full report.

Satisfaction with both the waste collection and waste disposal service in 2005/06 was poor and in the worst 25 per cent of national performance with 74 per cent of residents’ satisfied with the waste collection service and 72 per cent of residents’ satisfied with the waste disposal service.

That’s over a quarter of the population dissatisfied with a service that most people ordinarily take for granted. The Commission also confirms my own experience.

The free garden waste collections service is also variable with some residents not having received a regular or reliable service.

The commission recommends that the council sets targets for improving residents’ level of satisfaction with the service. The council’s response, from our old friend, Mr Wren? Complacent.

I am delighted that the Audit Commission has recognised the council’s commitment and enthusiasm to continue to improve our waste services and increase the level of recycling and composting that our residents help us to achieve. If they were to come back this time next year, I think they would be totally impressed.

Perhaps they should first try to impress their local residents.