Bring bank closure a mistake

Judging by the often busy sites with islanders all doing their bit to keep the island clean, and attempting to keep the recycling percentages up, we are not alone.

Just for transparency, who actually made this final decision to close the bring banks? As president of the committee responsible for waste was it your final decision or your committee – (States' Trading Supervisory Board) – of which I believe to consist of three deputies (Roffey, Parkinson and Moakes), two non-States members and a managing director? It would be good to know this information for future elections.

To close these bring banks after what you claim was an independent survey of over 1,800 islanders, which is less than 3% of the current population, led you to believe that only 8% of those islanders rely on the bring banks doesn’t make any sense to me. From your own figures and using simple logic that means you made a decision believing that only 144 islanders rely solely on the bring banks. What about the other 97% of islanders who didn’t know about the survey or get a chance to have their say, or were taken into consideration?

If you used the mathematics and simple logic from your own survey and apply that to the other 97% of islanders that didn’t participate, i.e. 97% of 63,000, (estimated population) 61,200 islanders of then which 8% of those would be 4,896, then adding that figure to the 8% of the 1,800 that did participate (144 + 4896) that would give you 5,040 islanders who solely rely on these bring banks.

To add to the pro closure media campaign, we’ve recently had Guernsey Waste’s Sarah Robinson commenting on this decision, and I quote: ‘Post-Covid, the amount we collect through bring banks has fallen to such an extent we can no longer justify the cost of these facilities when other alternatives are readily available’. Well I’m not surprised if the amount you do collect has fallen, as you have quietly closed others sites down only leaving three remaining, Vazon Bay car park being one example closed post-Covid. Perhaps that was when the plan was hatched. Not all of us can use kerbside collections for a whole number of reasons, although we are still forced to pay for it annually. And it continues to increase without fail.

The cynical among us could imagine that closing these bring banks under the pretence that they aren’t being used, is just a way to force islanders to rely on the kerbside collection – or have no choice other than to queue up at Longue Hougue Reclamation Centre, then charge us for the privilege. The Guernsey Waste Strategy continues to lose the States of Guernsey (taxpayers’) money each year, what better way to get a few more £s out of islanders than this?

If saving £100,000 per annum is so important to the States of Guernsey maybe they could look closer to home. Two fewer deputies’ salaries should cover it. Or one civil service senior officer.

I do hope there are some extra staff employed to cope with the extra 5,000 islanders dropping off their waste at LHRC, and I wonder if they were factored in to the £100,000 annual saving.

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