Conservatives in Bolton have secured a major victory over Bolton Labour's plans to introduce a charge for green bin collections - the Garden Tax - on 80,000 homes in the borough.
After a huge campaign ran by local Conservatives, and with hundreds signing our petition, Labour have been forced to drop the plans. This comes as Conservative councillors launched scathing attacks on the plans at the Town Hall.
In addition to introducing an ill-thought out policy, Bolton Labour produced a consultation with flawed and biased questions. They were designed to leave people with the sense they couldn't disagree. Furthermore, they took a lack of responses to answers as active endorsement.
Shadow Cabinet Member for Climate Change and Environment, Cllr Nadim Muslim, said:
It was a ridiculous idea to begin with, and was not an idea that should ever have been proposed by the council.
As we said at the start, it was effectively a double charge, a garden tax they wanted to introduce for people already paying council tax.
What I want to see now is certainty from the council because when you look at their party’s record in government, they said they wouldn’t cut winter fuel payments for pensioners and they did, they said they would pay out compensation for Waspi women and they didn’t.
So, I wouldn’t trust anything the Labour Party has to say about this.
They’ve only done this because of our campaign against the garden tax, our petition against the garden tax and making people aware of this.
They’ve tried to do this once so why wouldn’t they do it again? And of course, we know that the wording to the survey was flawed so we really have got to stay vigilant.
