Monday, August 04, 2008

Rubbish Facts

I have been alerted by Dave of Solarventi to a 'debate' raging on the Jeremy Vine show (actually Matthew Bannister) on R2 regarding fines for bin taxes.

A lot of arguments made (and coming in as I write) are now well recycled (!), but one issue raised by the 'experts' struck me and hence I have written in:

Just listening to the 'debate', where the facts flying around, especially without much context, are worth as much as stats.

If there have been 'only' 1,000 prosecutions so far, one presumes these to have been successful. How many have not been? What have been the costs to the taxpayer of people and systems to generate this deterrent/revenue generator, over and above the ever so slight public negative perception of anything green hued these days (VED anyone?).

I suspect the £70k garnered so far might not have covered the costs of a few Civ. Servants for one year, and hence how much has been wasted that could have gone in much greener and more efficient directions?

1 comment:

Dave said...

1,000 fines this last year.
10,000 in the next year?
100,000 in 2010?
1,000,000 a year by 2015?

Fines systems do seem to have a self fulfilling means of accelerating themselves. (Think Parking Wardens, Traffic Cameras etc.)