Common sense on communal bins

When they were first rolled out in the New Town and Abbeyhill before the 2022 election, officers adopted a pig-headed approach to the locations, some might say Stalinist, in which reasonable requests from residents affected by the most insensitive positions were rejected without much consideration.

Communal bins in Broughton Place.

It made no difference if the stinking great things were plonked outside their windows, even if there was a perfectly good site only a few metres away. I had to tell one poor, exasperated woman that it was unacceptable to the officers for people to cross the road to empty a bin.

Another was placed right outside a tenement entrance, turning the ground floor flat of a woman with a debilitating illness into a garbage depot. Again, policy said no to repositioning.

Now a new policy has been adopted for relatively narrow streets, which acknowledges that negative impact on a householder should be a factor. Hooray.

But why has it taken so long, and why did it only happen after a costly review, when the need for a common-sense approach was blindingly obvious from the start?

Was it because the council was led by an arrogant bunch of ideologues who thought they always knew better, and sneeringly dismissed any criticisms because they were so convinced of their own self-righteousness? Or was it because they were just plain stupid?