Refunds of £25 garden tax only in ‘extreme cases’ – John McLellan

A basic principle of good consumer relations is you get what you pay for or you are due a refund. Subject to conditions of course.

There's very little chance of getting your money back if you are dissatisfied with the brown bin service. Picture: Jane Barlow

But when the bill is a tax it doesn’t come with any obligation to deliver – the deal is you can vote out an administration at election time for failure to keep promises but there is no way you are getting your money back.

The lines become blurred when authorities charge for a service because their instinct is to treat it as a tax, and so it is with Edinburgh Council’s £25 charge for emptying brown garden bins.

A report on the Garden Tax to today’s transport and environment committee sets out stringent conditions for residents but rejects any notion of partial refunds if the council fails to meet its side of the bargain.

This is apparently because the cost of each uplift is too small for it to be worth the council’s bother and the only way you get your money back is when the service is so bad the council decides it’s too much trouble to continue.

“Where a genuine problem of ongoing service failure is identified, and the customer prefers this course of action, in extreme cases a full refund may be provided and the service ceased,” says the report. Which translates roughly as “If we are forced to reimburse you, you’re out”.

The SNP-Labour administration loves telling us about pioneering public services and this certainly breaks new ground in customer relations.

Uni needs to put its house in order

Edinburgh University’s decision to withdraw from the Stead’s Place development on Leith Walk, where it originally hoped to run a postgraduate accommodation centre, poses questions about its plans for future growth. Had the university been front and centre of Stead’s Place, the plan might have been different and local attitudes more sympathetic, but in walking away it has left its erstwhile partner, Drum Property, in the lurch.

Judging by a presentation last week about the university’s plans for data-driven innovation in Lauriston, it’s still full steam ahead for expansion so the issue about how much responsibility the university takes for a growing population remains.

Higher education is a vital part of Edinburgh’s economic future, but the universities need to do a lot more to counter negative attitudes towards student numbers and, as they are doing with the Peffermill sports village, that means taking more responsibility for accommodation.

Survey says it’s just capital here

The Institute of Fiscal Studies this week piled in behind the United Nations to condemn inequality in the UK, despite record employment, increasing wages and the top one per cent of earners paying just under a third of all income tax.

Some people unquestionably exist in dreadful circumstances and the number of rough sleepers and beggars on Edinburgh’s streets is ample proof, but the Edinburgh People Survey found that 19 per cent of people are doing better financially than a year ago compared to two per cent who are much worse off. Although 65 per cent reported unchanged circumstances, in Edinburgh at least the trends are going in the right direction.

Root and branch reform

After embracing concrete as an appropriate building material for the World Heritage Site, the city council is about to endorse the mass cultivation of trees on George Street, where none were planned by the Georgians. Given the stushie about Princes Street Gardens, most people like trees and won’t care too much about the specifics of the Craig/Adam vision and maybe the Georgians just got that wrong. But it does show how difficult it is to be dogmatic, even in a World Heritage Site.