Recycling centres seem designed to keep people out, little wonder the rubbish is piling up - David Behrens
Andy Burnham’s prime ministerial honeymoon lasted exactly 24 hours. That’s how long it took one of his rivals to stab him in the back. Darren Jones, a Machiavellian pretender who was Keir Starmer’s Minister for Intergovernmental Relations (seriously?) had fancied himself for a tilt at the party leadership back in May.
Evidently no-one told him the bus had left without him – and that thanks to Starmer’s successor the fares had gone down.
In the first show of defiance at the new PM, Jones warned that the decision to cut VAT from electricity bills was “unfunded”. So was his old boss’s digital ID scheme but that didn’t seem to worry him.
He and the other Starmer outcasts had failed to grasp what Burnham has long understood: it’s not only what you say that matters, it’s how you say it.
The first rule of communicating is to put yourself in the mind of someone hearing the message for the first time. Does it sound like good news or bad? Does it even make sense? Reducing electricity bills, even by just a bit, ticks those boxes. So does capping bus fares at £2.
Jones, though, is one of those politicians driven by ideology rather than ideas and that’s the sort of utopianism that has undermined Labour through the generations. The Left has always been more comfortable controverting itself than crystallising and communicating a vision.
It helps explain the jumble of announcements that marked the last government’s early days: placating militant rail unions at the direct expense of pensioners’ fuel benefits and farmers’ inheritance tax. Starmer came across like a doctor telling you to swallow your medicine and stop making such a fuss.
Burnham has clearly learned from those mistakes but some of his former colleagues in local government have been slower on the uptake.
In Bradford, a district that also includes Ilkley and Haworth, the council has told residents in the bluntest terms that they face prosecution for fly-tipping if they leave black bags next to their wheelie bins on collection day. How was that supposed to go down? Did they think families would enjoy being addressed in those terms by people whose job it is to collect their rubbish?
The rules vary, in any case. Not everyone would have realised that bin bags were forbidden. To be suddenly told they were now fly-tipping would have only worsened the distrust between council and customer.
Illegal dumping is endemic in Bradford and it’s as much the council’s fault as anyone else’s. Labour was running City Hall in 2024 when it closed three recycling centres to save money. The resulting queues at those that remain have caused residents to find other solutions, and leaving bags beside their bins is the least antisocial of them.
Many others – the real fly-tippers – simply dump their detritus wherever they want. In Manningham, opposite Bradford City’s stadium, three-quarters of an acre of scrub has become a de facto tip for household and industrial waste on a scale so immense that a ghastly stench now hangs over the whole area.
It’s the most egregious example of a problem right across last year’s City of Culture, in which more than 20,000 fly-tipping incidents are now reported annually.
That being the case, you’d have thought they’d be opening more recycling centres, not closing them down. But that would take organisation and investment and neither has ever been Bradford Council’s strong suit. Picking off residents one bin bag at a time is more its style.
And it’s all very well to plead poverty but this week councillors effectively turned away a £20m grant from Westminster by deciding not to build a new swimming pool in a deprived suburb. It had been in the works for years but now, with Reform ruling a minority administration, we’re told the costs would outweigh the benefits.
Or perhaps they were afraid their neighbours would fill it with rubbish instead of water.
It’s not just a local problem, of course. Recycling centres that ought to be the first recourse of anyone with an old fridge or tub of rubble to get rid of seem designed to keep people out, with endless rules on who can use them and who can’t. When I lived near Ilkley there was a tip 500 yards from my house but I wasn’t welcome there because it was on the wrong side of the council border.
That sort of institutional overreach is exactly what fuels resentment and distrust higher up the chain of command. It helps explain why so many felt so alienated, so soon, from Keir Starmer. It’s time for some straight talking and whether you like Andy Burnham or not, he does at least realise that.