Hackney’s environment chief and leading Tory councillor clash over transport and waste policies

An impassioned debate has broken out between local Labour and Conservative councillors over Town Hall policy during the coronavirus crisis.

Hackney’s Labour council recently passed measures switching black bin waste collections at street-level properties to fortnightly from next year, as well as using experimental traffic orders (ETOs) to close a number of roads across the borough to help with social distancing and encourage active travel.

However, Conservative councillors have hit out at the new waste strategy’s imposition despite a consultation with residents showing a majority of 52 per cent against it, going on to accuse the Town Hall of “using Covid to drive through their new crazy schemes, and once Covid has gone, it will continue”.

Addressing the new waste strategy, Conservative councillor Simche Steinberger said: “I think it’s an utter disgrace. They’re using an excuse about recycling, and it’s nothing to do with recycling, it’s just to do with pennypinching.

“In our annual budget, it would be our top priority for it to continue the way it is, the waste strategy. You’re going to have rubbish lying for another week, especially in the summer, it’s going to bring a hell of a lot of dirt to the area and not help anything.

“I did not even bother to respond to this consultation. It was obvious they were going to do it even before the consultation started, you could see straight away it was going to happen. If you’re not listening to a majority on such a high turnout, why are you wasting money consulting?

“Perhaps we should stop recycling. People should put their foot down. Hackney has got to the point where the Labour Party is running it like a dictatorship. It can’t be the same few Conservative councillors, it’s got to the point where the residents have to get together and put their foot down on this nonsense.”

Under the plans, voted through last week, recycling and food waste services will remain weekly, with 180-litre wheelie-bins to be introduced in response to residents’ concern raised during the consultation over a rise in vermin, people rummaging in bins, and overflowing containers.

The council saw the biggest ever response to a consultation on the issue, which is aimed at boosting recycling and rates and decrease the amount of waste sent for incineration by the North London Waste Authority, thus saving the Town Hall a significant amount of money as levies increase.

Fifty-two per cent of more than 10,000 respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the proposal to collect non-recyclable waste fortnightly, with 55 per cent believing it would have a negative impact on their household. Thirty-nine per cent of respondents agreed with the proposals.

Labour Cllr Jon Burke, who leads on waste for the council, has said that the purpose of such a consultation is to gauge the public’s attitude towards the measures, giving the council a steer on what it needs to communicate to Hackney “to get [residents] to a place that they’re comfortable with the proposals”, as well as identifying problems specific groups might have with compliance.

Cllr Burke said: “Cllr Steinberger labours under a persistent belief that consultations are referendums that we decide to ignore. The test of democracy, which is what he seems to apply, cannot be, ‘It’s undemocratic if I don’t get what I want’. That’s not how democracy works.

“We’ve been led to believe in recent years by charlatan politicians that the average member fo the public knows just as much about how to decarbonise the waste system as I do, and they don’t. In the same way, the same average member of the public who is a nurse knows a lot more about nursing than I will ever do.

“One of the great things about representative democracy is, you get to send people to the Town Hall that you’re confident can deliver these things, and then they go ahead and deliver them. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t revisit that at the ballot box four years later.

“The way I see consultation working is, you go to the public and you give them for a temporary time an advisory role in the process. I’m loth to quote Margaret Thatcher, but she famously said, ‘Advisers advise, and ministers decide’. I take that advice from the public very seriously, but if the ultimate duty to take responsibility for any failures with the policy lies with me, then the ultimate duty to make the decision around that policy lies with me and the administration.”

Unconvinced by the waste chief’s arguments, the Conservative councillor for Springfield underlined that his party in Labour’s position would not consult on policies for which “there was no other option”, and that “there are so many millions of other ways to save money” than the new strategy.

When quizzed on where the Hackney Conservatives would save costs elsewhere, Cllr Steinberger posited instead a system of blanket fines for those who do not recycle, while focusing on the recycling rate on estates.

Burke has also been at the forefront of the council’s swift action to close a number of roads across the borough to help people better social distance as well as to ensure safety for pedestrians and cyclists as London sees an uptick in dangerous driving during the crisis.

Broadway Market has been closed to through-traffic and parking suspended, with closures also seen under six-month ETOs at Barnabas Road and Ashenden Road in Homerton,Gore Road by Victoria Park and Ufton Road in De Beauvoir.

In making the changes, the council stresses it is following guidance from transport secretary Grant Shapps, who recently laid out a statutory toolkit in expectation that councils would “make significant changes to their road layouts to give more space to cyclists and pedestrians”, in order that transport networks are part of the recovery from the coronavirus crisis.

In conversation with the LDRS, the waste and transport chief said that he has been trying to “extricate” the council from conducting full public consultations on transport schemes prior to their implementation no matter their size, while moving towards imposing ETOs, through which the council would consult residents on the impact of the scheme concurrently to implementing it, making schemes “no longer a matter for speculation or debate”.

However, responding to the use of ETOs, Cllr Steinberger said: “Welcome to Hackney Labour politics. No democracy anymore, they just do what they want.

“[Cllr Burke] has found a way to do it, to bring in these policies, by using Covid as an excuse, which are going to continue after Covid also.  I think the worst thing is on Barnabas Road is that it’s a through road to the hospital. How are we letting them get away with it, using Covid as an excuse?

“What decides them trying to put these socialist policies in place using Covid for their benefit? I think it’s shocking. It’s a disgrace they’re using Covid for their own hobbies, which they couldn’t ram onto the residents because the residents didn’t want it, and now using the government’s advice that people should be safe – what’s that got to do with closing that road?

“Why are they using something which is unfortunately such a bad thing, Covid, for their hobbies? It’s a disgrace.”

The Springfield councillor went on to argue that dangerous driving, one of the reasons the Town Hall has given for its imposition of the measures, would be occurring “all year around” in the absence of the coronavirus crisis, going on to point to public health guidance advising the avoidance of public transport as an argument for travelling privately.

However, Burke dismissed Steinberger’s accusation that the council have been using Covid as a cover to implement the transport measures “through the back door”, pointing to local Labour’s 2018 manifesto promising to reallocate road space from the private car as proof that the measures would have been put in place, crisis or not.

Burke said: “It is not a matter of opinion that road safety has significantly declined in the lockdown period, it is a statement of fact that we have been finding vehicles travelling at 40mph in a 20mph zone. It is also a statement of fact that driver compliance with speed limits has declined fastest and deepest in London than anywhere else in the country.

“The current modal filters that are in the pipeline were already in development before coronavirus broke, so that is the strongest indication that this is not some cynical attempt to deliver things that we otherwise weren’t thinking of delivering anyway.

“Barnabas Road for example, and some of the other ones that will be coming forward, is based entirely on road safety and hostile vehicle information that we had prior to coronavirus.

“It feels like Cllr Steinberger shouldn’t be directing his ire towards me but towards the transport minister of a government comprised of a political party of which he is a member and the local representative.”

EDIT: This article was updated at 21:49 on Tuesday 26 May. The initial version had Cllr Burke attempting to “extricate” the council from consultations on council schemes in favour of ETOs, rather than from full public consultations on schemes prior to their implementation.