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Weekly bin collections return
Weekly bin collections are to return to every home in Preston in a dramatic u-turn which will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Preston Council is planning to pour more than 400,000 in rolling out the collections to more than 50,000 homes across the city over the next four years.
The re-introduction of the seven day collection comes three years after it was scrapped.
The plans are included in the Conservative administration's first budget which also includes cuts to services in a bid to plug a 1.5 million black hole in the council's finances.
The Tory budget, which is almost certain to be approved by the majority of councillors, is also looking at cutting back opening hours at some of the city's leisure centres, removing creche facilities, axing a tourist information centre and selling off two landmark buildings.
The proposed 3.9% council tax increase would see the tax bill for a Band D homes in non-parished areas of the city will pay at least 1,318.71 in the next financial year, which excludes police and fire service precepts.
The return to weekly bin collections - which ended in May 2005 - comes after complaints from householders that rubbish left to fester for a fortnight was attracting rats and maggots and causing stenches.
Since last summer 7,000 homes in the Deepdale area have been having their food waste collected weekly as part of a pilot scheme.
Related stories:
>Council will scrap weekly bin pickup
>Bin pledge for worried villagers
Deputy leader Eric Fazackerley, the cabinet member for resources, said: "That is not going to happen in a year and there has obviously we have got to priortise the areas where we know there is the most need, but the government targets we are up against dictate we have to make improvements and this will do that.
"When we first came to power nine months ago, we said we needed to look at ways to develop our waste collections and we feel this is a way of meeting that obligation."
Residents in Whittingham hit out last year when the council announced it would not collect bins for three weeks over Christmas.
Whittingham Road resident Helen Atkinson, 53, said the new move to weekly collections was a good thing.
She said: "I'm pleased, as long as they carry on with the recycling.
"I cannot see how they will afford it though."
Under the changes, which will go before a meeting of the full council next Friday (FEB 29), homes would get an extra food waste container to go alongside their grey general waste bin, the brown garden waste bin, and other boxes for paper, glass, tin and plastic bottles.
Lancashire MPs Nigel Evans and Lindsay Hoyle called in Parliament last year for weekly collections to be reintroduced, after Preston, South Ribble, Chorley, Lancaster, Fylde, Wyre and West Lancashire switched to fortnightly uplifts.
But proposals to reintroduce weekly food waste collections in South Ribble were put on ice earlier this month when the cash-strapped borough council said reintroducing weekly uplifts would cost 2m and hike up council tax.
In Fylde and Wyre, weekly collections are set to return for kitchen waste when a new rubbish plant is built in 2010.
The budget proposals in Preston would see opening hours at the Fulwood Leisure Centre reviewed, creches at Fulwood and West View Leisure Centres shut, and the removal of free leisure centre use for the unemployed under the Passport to Leisure scheme.
Coun Fazackerley said that cuts had been chosen because the services "could not be justified" by the number of people using them.
There will be a review of the tourist information centres, which could see the centre in the Guildhall shut and services merged into either the Town Hall or Harris Museum services, which could save 140,000 over four years.
Other cuts including upping charges for crematoriums and cemeteries, introducing energy efficient light bulbs in the city's parks and selling off the historic former Post Office on Birley Street and Amounderness House on Lancaster Road.
It appears the plans could go through unchallenged with the opposition Labour group yet to draw up its own amendments to the Conservative proposals.
Leader Coun John Collins said that his group would prepare its budget at a meeting on Tuesday night and not present it until the day of the meeting on Friday.
But, mayor Christine Abram, who will chair the meeting, said she would not accept amendments "off the hoof."
Coun Collins said: "We will oppose these cuts and are now exploring ways to find the money."
Liberal Democrat leader Coun Danny Gallagher said the proposals put forward by the Conservatives was something his group would "broadly accept."
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Weather for Preston
Saturday 04 February 2012
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