I hope everyone enjoyed the Jubilee weekend. At least we got a few hours of OK weather. I am disappointed to have still not enjoyed a ‘Jubilee Pudding’, though.
One piece of news you may have (understandably) missed amidst the festivities is that, as of last week, you can now ask the Council to collect unwanted items of bulky waste from your doorstep free of charge.
Bulky waste items are things like old or unwanted cookers, sofas, tables, chairs, mattresses, or white goods. It’s the large stuff you cannot fit in your bins.
You can book your slot online for the free collection of up to three items from your doorstep once every six months (although fridges and freezers are restricted to one item every six months, simply because it is far more expensive for the Council to dispose of them).
A total of 80 slots a week, or 16 free pick-ups every weekday, will be made available for residents and these can be booked up to two weeks in advance at reading.gov.uk/bulkywaste or by calling the Council’s call centre on 0118 937 3787 for those without internet access. Once booked, you just leave your item on your kerbside the morning of your allocated slot. We do expect slots to go very fast, particularly in the first few weeks of this new service, so please be patient when booking. Check back regularly as new slots will be added on a rolling basis 14 days in advance.
Before this initiative, it would have cost you £52.50 to have three bulky waste items collected by the Council from your doorstep. We are putting a quarter of a million pounds into this initiative, so it’s a significant investment on our part, and there are a number of reasons we think it’s worthwhile.
The first is simple and requires little explanation. We want to make life easier for Reading residents, particularly for the increasing number of Reading residents who do not own a vehicle to be able to take items to the Household Waste Recycling Centre at Smallmead.
Secondly, by offering a free doorstep collection service we hope to cut down on the number of trips people need to make to Smallmead. Not that you aren’t welcome there, but as Reading drives to its net zero carbon target by 2030 – and we’re making great strides on that front – one of the things we can do as a local authority is put policies and initiatives in place that help local people make a difference. This initiative is another small example of that.
And, finally, fly tipping is a scourge on our communities. I don’t accept that you can just dump something you no longer need expecting someone else to clean it up. It invariably falls to the Council to clear up the mess, and that of course is at the local council taxpayer’s expense.
We hope the introduction of this new initiative will make a difference, but I’m very clear that, even if we were not introducing it, it is a completely unacceptable act to dump your rubbish on the street. I’m certain law-abiding residents would agree. Where we can collect evidence, we will not hesitate in continuing to prosecute people who dump their waste. Fly tipping is a blight on parts of our borough that we are intent on eradicating.
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council, and ward member for Southcote
