Cabinet members of Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) will vote next Tuesday (21 July) on a consultation that recommends closing a number of its household waste recycling centres (HWRCs).

The move is being suggested as the council has to strip £350,000 from its HWRC budget by 2017/18 as part of its Medium Term Financial Plan.

OCC currently operates seven HWRCs across the county – Alkerton, Ardley, Stanton Harcourt, Drayton, Oakley Wood, Redbridge, and Stanford in the Vale. Over the course of one million visits a year, 45,000 tonnes of household waste are deposited at the sites with an average recycling rate of over 70 per cent.

In total, according to the consultation report by the council’s Director for Environment and Economy, this HWRC network costs £4.1 million to run; £1.2 million is spent on management fees, with the remaining £3.7 million being spent on transport, disposal and gate fees.

However, the council has found that all of the sites are currently nearing capacity and, due to population growth, a number of the sites will need to be expanded or replaced. Expansion is impossible at several of the sites, as Alkerton and Stanford HWRCs have limited planning permission and the Ardley site is due to be closed by its landowners in 2017.

Details of the proposal

The proposal suggests that, ‘in order to achieve a financially sustainable network of sites’, the council should reduce the number of HWRCs, while ensuring sites are as close to populated centres as possible, with drive time for residents using the facilities minimised.

It remains to be seen whether the closure of several of the sites would be followed by others being created in their place. But, in 2011, a previous HWRC strategy - which would have seen sites in Stanford in the Vale, Ardley and Alkerton closed and replaced by two new sites in the north of the county and at Kidlington - was agreed but then cancelled after land issues at the Kidlington site.

If the new HWRC strategy is agreed by the cabinet next week, a public consultation on the proposals will be carried out between 10 August and 5 October, giving residents the chance to comment on proposals, as well as suggest optimum opening hours for the facilities.

Consultation responses will then be developed into a final strategy that will be taken to the Cabinet for approval in December, with implementation following in early 2016, though the report states that the strategy may take ‘several years to fully implement’.

Withdrawal of Green Waste Credits planned to bridge budget gap

In order to meet budget constraints whilst work on the prospective strategy is taking place, the council also proposes to withdraw Green Waste Credits.

OCC currently pays the district and city councils a non-statutory green waste credit payment based on the tonnage of green garden waste delivered to OCC composting facilities.

This arrangement, says the consultation report, was established as part of the countywide strategy to encourage recycling, drive behaviour change, and subsidise collection costs during the roll out and expansion of green waste collection services.

In 2014/15 the green waste credit payment to the four districts cost OCC around £500,000, and in return Oxfordshire has had one of the highest countywide recycling rates in the country.

The proposal suggests that OCC continue to pay the gate fee for material being delivered from districts to OCC contracted facilities, but that the additional credit payment to the districts cease from 1 April 2016.

Local authorities looking to HWRCs to balance budget

Should OCC’s proposals go ahead, it would be the latest example of local authorities (LAs) across the UK cutting their HWRC facilities to save money.

In October last year, East Sussex County Council announced that three of its HWRCs would only open between Friday and Sunday in order to save the council around £250,000 a year.

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council also made changes to its HWRC opening hours in 2014, closing all four of their facilities for one day a week.

Other LAs have proposed meeting cuts by charging residents to use HWRCs, a practice that the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has sought to ban with legislation.

The DCLG decision upset many LAs, after a discussion paper issued earlier this year by the department was opposed by half of its respondents.

A number of the paper’s respondents reportedly noted that budget cuts from central government are presenting ‘challenges’ to providing HWRCs and that implementing charges could rectify this.

Learn more about Oxfordshire County Council’s HWRCs.