Birmingham: Waste Collection
Debate between Lincoln Jopp and Jim McMahon(1 day, 13 hours ago)
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Jim McMahon
I think I have covered this at least a couple of times. As I said, we are grateful to our colleagues in the Ministry of Defence for the logistical support they have provided. We had three members of staff on logistical planning; they have had a significant impact, and we and the council are grateful for that. There is no requirement for troops to be deployed on the streets to collect waste, because the council is getting on top of it. We do not take that for granted, and we do not want any disruption to that, but to be clear, the military are not needed on the streets of Birmingham. The council have the situation in hand, and workers are doing that work today.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)
I have a genuine question for the Minister. I am a little bit confused about what these three supermen and women from the MOD or the military have done. One of the principles of mutual aid and military aid to a civil authority is that the people being helped must not have the capacity themselves, and it must be unreasonable to expect them to grow that capacity in a timely manner. What have those people done that Birmingham city council could not do itself?
Jim McMahon
I am usually a bit suspicious when somebody starts their question with “This is a genuine question”, but that was actually a proper question. Members could learn from it. [Interruption.] Calm down. On the added value that the MOD was able to provide, every council has rotas for getting bins collected from a given place. Birmingham had mutual aid offers from other councils, and it had to work out how best to use quite different offers of support—how to deploy trucks and available workers across the city, working in a different way. The logistical workers from the MOD supported the creation of new collection rounds to clear the accumulated waste.