The Dawn Bin Raiders - What a Waste of Resources

IMAGINE being woken up at half-five in the morning by strange men sifting through your wheelie bin before gathering all of your rubbish and pouring it into a white van.
You are likely to feel slightly afraid wondering what the hell is going on! You might even call the police for fear you are being robbed!
But this scenario is being played out in Lancashire where the county council is sending out agency workers in the early hours of the morning to look through people's bins! It recently happened in a surburban part of Chorley where one woman said she was about to call the police and another man approached them to ask why they were snooping at such a ridiculous time.
Why? Apparently, to find out what we are throwing away as it helps them launch campaigns to minimise the wrong things going to landfill! And the county council say they are justified in doing this.
An article is set to go into a local newspaper about this scandalous activity which one councillor thought was a wind-up! And so did I when I first heard of it.
Not only that, it costs £30,000 of taxpayers' money per "waste audit" and a team of up to nine people are needed for this. They sign confidentiality agreements apparently so we can all be safe they won't be nicking our identities any time soon with the information they find!!! I'm not convinced.
In this era of constant privacy breaches, this really takes the biscuit and I urge anyone who reads this to write to the county council to vent their frustrations!
I will post the news article here when it finally goes up online.

PFI in Lancashire Hurts, Financially!

TAXPAYERS in Lancashire might not be too pleased to hear that PFI projects in their county is costing BILLIONS of pounds more than what they were first valued at!
A whopping £2.5bn in payments must be found over 25 years for projects originally worth just £424.9m - and that's just county council projects covering a few schools and a waste management project! That does not include NHS and other agency PFI contracts.
And of those billions, £609m must be forked out in interest!
The Campaign for Better Politics thinks this is plain crazy and is yet another example of building public projects by the back door. Enough is enough!
PFI is killing this country and holding us further to ransom in tough economic times. It's time to campaign for it to be scrapped!

A Gallery Nobody Wants Millions Overbudget

TAKE a controversial art gallery and millions of pounds worth of public money and you've got the perfect cocktail for waste!
Yes, and this time it's Colchester Council to burn public money by admitting a further two million pounds is needed to compete the town's Firstsite Newsite Gallery.
The project has a 7.3m shortfall with the taxpayer haing to pay at least 3.75m towards the scheme.
Yet, nobody seems to want the gallery!
--
FROM COLCHESTER GAZETTE:
http://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/3856238.Colchester____2m_more_to_finish_off_new_art_gallery/