Foul Excuse Of The Day

From The Telegraph:

At least 2.6million households now have microchips in their bins which can be used to weigh the amount of waste used. Information collected by the microchips, which electronically measure the weight of rubbish in bins, is meant to be used to educate households about cutting waste. But critics fear the chips will make it easy for the Government to resurrect plans for a £50 pay-as-you-throw tax on millions of families...

I just don't get it. Ignoring the ludicrous Landfill Tax (which is a tax on councils, but income for central government), the total cost of collecting household rubbish is only a couple of billion pounds a year (household rubbish is only about a third of all waste by volume), maybe a hundred pounds per household.

Tracking down and somehow taxing everything that people throw away is nigh impossible, but as (a) it only seems fair to pay for refuse collection via user charges on volume, and (b) the amount of rubbish you throw away is broadly proportional to the amount of stuff that you buy, why not just earmark a very small fraction of the tens of billions in VAT collected from the sale of new goods as the payment towards refuse collection, meaning that refuse collection can continue to be 'free at point of use'?

Anyways, the punchline is right at the end of the article:

A spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents councils, added: "Microchips simply identify the house to which a bin belongs... If an elderly resident needs help getting their bin collected and returned, a microchip quickly flags it up to the refuse collector, saving time and money."

Do they seriously intend to kit out every bin man (or bin woman) with a hand-held scanner to walk up the garden path, read the chip in every bin that was not placed within the prescribed number of centimetres of the pavement, and, if that bin is not shown as registered to an elderly or disabled person, walk back down the garden path sans bin? That's one heck of a snub to the physically-fit-but-forgetful crowd, and hardly saves 'time and money', does it?

Now, I know that some people proudly mark their own wheelie bin with their house number, but if its the elderly and disabled we're worried about, why not give them big yellow stickers to put on their bins (marked with the house number) and have done with it? OK, this idea needs a bit of work, as some elderly people might be nervous of advertising the fact to possible burglars, but hey. Alternatively, they could give the driver of the bin lorry a list of such houses or something - worth a fortune down the pub, but they still could collate these lists themselves by scanning the microchips, so that's not really an argument against?