Shocking u-turn on closing two Wiltshire recycling centres

The sites at Purton, in the north of the county, and Lower Compton, near Calne, will remain open for the next three years – long enough, the council hopes, to establish a new HRC in Royal Wootton Bassett.

The news was broadly welcomed – although some opposition councillors were angry that it had been presented to the meeting of Wiltshire Council’s cabinet on Tuesday, February 3 only after it was broken by council leader Ian Thorn at Calne Town Council the evening prior, while he was fighting to save his position as town mayor.

The row over HRCs has rumbled on for two months, after Liberal Democrat cabinet members took a snap decision on December 9 to close two facilities owned and managed by Swindon-based Hills Waste Solutions, saying they were “unaffordable.”

Complaints, petitions, threats, and meetings with angry members of the public followed.

Then on Monday, February 2 Wiltshire Council leader Ian Thorn told a meeting of Calne Town Council – where he was seeing off a vote of no confidence for failing to fight the parish’s corner over the closures – that a deal had been struck and the facilities would be staying open.

That news was confirmed during the morning session of the cabinet meeting, when Cllr Gavin Grant, portfolio holder for finance, asked for a saving of £493,000 to be stripped from the draft budget.

Cllr Grant told members it was as the result of “an agreement reached with Hills Waste Solutions” to provide a continuation of the service “at a level the council can afford.”

Both Purton and Lower Compton will remain open for three years as part of the deal, he said, with ” a piece of work underway to establish a location for a household recycling centre owned by Wiltshire Council and operated by a private contractor” in the north of the county.

Cllr Paul Sample, cabinet member for waste, added: “The deals we are signing with Hills will remain in place until a new household recycling centre in the north of the county is fully up and running.

“The decision-making process has not been simply about contracts or figures on a spreadsheet. It has been about ensuring that value for money goes hand-in-hand with service quality and environmental responsibility.”

However, there was anger about how the news was broken. Cllr Ashley O’Neill, Conservative, (Calne Rural) told Cllr Thorn: “You made the announcement last night at a Calne Town Council meeting.

“That is disrespectful to members of this council.

“I hope you will consider if it is appropriate to sit as mayor of Calne and leader of this council.

“You are privy to information that you would not be aware of if you were only the mayor of Calne.”

While Ed Rimmer, leader of the Reform UK group on Wiltshire Council, said: “It’s not great that this was announced yesterday at a Calne Town Council meeting where there was a vote of no confidence in Cllr Thorn.”

And Cllr Dominic Muns (Conservative, The Lavingtons) complained that an attempt by Tory colleagues to ‘call in’ the decision to close the HRCs in December had been refused because the matter was time-critical.

“Here we are two months later, and the consultation that couldn’t be held, the timeline that could not be extended, the decision that could not be changed, and the call-in which we didn’t have time for has all been proven completely untrue.”

And he asked Cllr Thorn: “Do you accept that your refusal to consult with the public or allow the call-in because of a time sensitivity, which it transpires did not exist, reflects a deep contempt for this council’s constitution and for residents in Wiltshire?

“To what extent was your announcement of this U turn at a town council meeting last night driven by the fact that you were facing a vote of no confidence, and wasn’t this a huge conflict of interest?

“And finally, Cllr Sample, can we expect to see your resignation over this embarrassing U turn and the catalogue of mistruths that it has exposed?”

Cllr Thorn said the cabinet was acting on advice that the decision was “extraordinarily time-sensitive” and “I’m not willing to have fake consultation where there were no real choices.”

“Had we waited, we could have ended up with the clock ticking and another million pounds on the bill,” he said. “A decision had to be made in the best interests of council tax payers.”

“I’m not going to make any apology. We didn’t buckle to the original demand. We didn’t buckle to the enormous response. I didn’t buckle to the abuse and threats to my person.”

On the Calne Town Council announcement, he said: “It was vital that I explained in very broad terms that there had been some progress.”

And Cllr Sample said: “We inherited some of the worst recycling rates in the whole of the country. We are close to being one of the lowest performers.

“Our ambition is to increase recycling rates significantly, and that’s what we are going to do. We are going to deliver recycling rates of around 60 per cent.

“As long as I have the support of the leader, I will continue to deliver that ambition.”

After the meeting a spokesman for Hills said: “While we await formal notification from Wiltshire Council with regards to their intentions at both Purton and Lower Compton, we welcome their reconsideration of the importance of these community facilities, and will continue to work with the council.”