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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.

I tried out the new branch of Rendezvous this lunchtime, on the corner of Haydon Street and Corporation Street. The smell of fresh paint was still detectable at the entrance, though fortunately not beyond. The meal, at £7 for three courses plus china tea, was sufficient, though not generous… which is how I like it at lunchtime — an afternoon’s work on a bloated stomach is never the most efficient. The decor also is sufficient, functional and tidy without being overly elaborate. I found all three courses a little sweet for my liking, but still very good for the price. The crispy pancake roll starter was quite mild, to my liking. The main course of beef with green peppers and black bean sauce was good, with tasty thin slices of beef. I would have preferred to have had a choice of fried or boiled rice, rather than it being prescribed on the menu, but that is a minor quibble, and the fried rice was very finely done and not greasy as is often the case, even in much more expensive restaurants. The desert was fine, though slightly crisper batter for the apple fritter would have been nice. Finally, the pot of china tea was very generously sized, though a little weak. Service was a little confused — to many waiters with not enough customers to serve — but I am sure that will improve as trade picks up. In all, the meal was good for the price and the establishment is a welcome addition to this corner of Swindon.

If I owned one of the flats in Erin Court or Shire Court I would be a little worried. An artist’s impression shown in The Adver on Friday give a slightly better idea as to the intended route of the canal into Swindon. It will clearly cross Kingshill Road and, following the original line of the canal, pass between Erin Court and Shire Court, before turning sharp left, through the site of what is currently a car valeting and secondhand car sales forecourt, then sharp right into Westcott Place. The flats in the two courts are built very close to the line of the old canal: they would have water lapping right below their windows. In addition, somewhere in this short length of canal a lock must be fitted in too, as Westcott Place is below the level of the old canal route.

Still, if the artist is to be believed the Falcon Inn could be the first in a new generation of canal side pubs in Swindon (for ghosts, by the look it). I’m not holding my breath. The council has yet to find the £50M to fund this without directly charging it to the council tax… which is why I say the flat owners should only be a little worried.

I see that Swindon Council leader, Mr Bluh, has been drinking at the fountain of verbal garbage again. To quote.

We need to drive the whole community forward including businesses, partners and residents. We all have to play our part in meeting a global challenge. The town’s growth agenda doesn’t play into sustainability. We have an even bigger challenge to make sure it does. We have the vision and the low-level detail. Now we need to get it embedded into everything we do.

Really? And the meaning of that pile of twaddle is what? Mr Bluh may think he has ‘vision’ but what he’s saying is just a fog of tired, content-free phrases. If he does have ‘the vision and the low-level detail’ then why within the same article is one of his council officers quoted as saying.

This council recognises that it doesn’t know enough at the moment. It is about being an example, but at the moment we are not.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Mr Bluh has just slung together several sentences of imprecise waffle to try and sound impressive, without knowing anything about which he speaks.

The failings in the publicity for Swindon Borough Council’s new fortnightly waste collections are now getting some news media coverage, from both the BBC and the Adver. The tone of both, though, is that this is just a temporary problem, that once people realise their waste will only be collected once a fortnight, the problem will go away. I don’t believe that. In streets with wheelie bins, some have a long way to go to bring their waste down to the one-wheelie-load per fortnight limit. It’s the same in blue bag streets, where many houses have put out several blue bags (I counted five outside one house in Westcott Place this morning), rather than just two as prescribed by the council.

The council say they’ll collect black bags for just one more week (this one). Unless there’s a big education effort on increasing recycling and reducing waste, it looks as though the streets of Swindon are going to be foul with uncollected waste for many weeks or months to come.

Looks like Swindon Borough Council may have forgotten to maintain the payments for their website. Since the beginning of the weekend at least, it’s been showing the holding page from Netnames, the council’s domain registrar.

Update, Tuesday 13 November: the site is back to normal now.

Today I have been the recipient of part of Ms Snelgrove’s £144,330 annual expenses spend: her parliamentary report. Being paid for with tax payer’s money, the criticism of the local blue nest is more subdued than usual, but it remains pure classic snelgrove.

Whatever I do in my work at the Houses of Parliament, I always think ‘how would this affect Swindon?’

Really? I presume she next thinks ‘What do the party whips want me to do?’ and the answer to that always takes precedence over the effect on Swindon. It’s nice to see her concern for the rural areas around Swindon too.

Constituents in rural areas often feel their concerns are not as high on the council agenda as those of more urban communities. Smaller villages need to retain their individual identities and I want to make sure that they are not ‘lumped in’ with other areas.

Well, perhaps she could make a useful contribution by opposing her own government’s imposition of 34,000 extra houses around Swindon over the next twenty years. Or would that be too much like putting the interests of Swindon before her attempts to crawl up the political ladder?

I feel I should apologise for overstating how obvious the ‘no black bag collections after 5 November’ statement was. Looking out in my street a few minutes ago, there was not a black bag in sight (our traditional collection would have been tomorrow morning), but Westcott Place and the Railway Village are very much black bag ago-go areas. I thus deduce that the little-yellow-label-on-plastic-bag’ communication method was not uniform across the town and other less fortunate souls may have had this important communication via more obscure means.

I also note that some in the Railway Village have taken the ‘there will be no collections from the alleyways’ message to heart, and have moved their wheelie bins to the fronts of their houses.

I’m not aware of there being a ‘Most incompetent communications exercise’ competition for local councils, but it seems that the current administration would be the unchallengeable winners if there were.

The rather active populous at the other end of central ward have set-up a new blog for the campaign against fortnightly rubbish collections, as opposition extends in Swindon beyond the local area. For those interested in the campaign, it has some useful information. The same people have also reported a certain level of confusion from the council workers as to who will have a wheelie bin collection and who will not. To tell people that a wheelie bin is only for storing rubbish in and that rubbish will not be collected from it (they need to take the rubbish out of the wheelie bin before putting it out for collection) is to bring the whole process down to the level of farce.

Earlier this evening, I took a few moments to vote in the council’s Pride of Place poll for people to chose their favourite tourist attraction in Swindon. I was only the sixth person to do so. However, as a government idea to encourage people to connect with their council it seems rather trivial. If the government really want people to connect with their council they should consider giving back to local councils the many powers they have transferred to ministers for the last ten years.