Tonight is the full meeting of the Council. I will be speaking on the administration’s policy item whci is about improving recycling rates. The main thrust of the item is that it is better to incentivise   people to recycle by rewarding them in some way rather than taxing their polluting behaviour. I shall be arguing that we need both and that Green taxes rather than taxes on income are far better if they are not applied as a stealth tax but as part of a redistribution of the tax …

At the last Council meeting I asked how many staff were in the community protection group. The CPG is the group within the council tasked with enforcing things like dog fouling, littering and some parking offences such as parking on the zig zag lines outside a school.
There are 54 staff in the CPG. There are 21 wards so that makes just over 2.5 staff per ward. The Safer neighbourhood team in High Barnet have 9 staff who could be enforcing these powers. When I asked how many of the CPG …