People who use Cherwell District Council’s (CDC) garden waste service are being notified of a £3 price rise in 2023, subject to approval at a meeting of the council’s executive on Monday 7 November.
Published: Tuesday, 1st November 2022
Residents purchase their annual brown bin licences from CDC, covering a year’s worth of collections from the start of March to the end of the following February. The popular early-bird discount is set to be retained.
Registration opens on 1 December and people will be charged £39 for a single annual subscription licence if they sign up before 28 February 2023. Anyone who signs up from 1 March 2023 will pay £43. Both these fees have increased by just £3 for a whole year.
Councillor Dan Sames, Portfolio Holder for Cleaner and Greener Communities, said: “We are very grateful to everyone who uses our fortnightly garden waste service. We are acutely aware of the pressures on many people’s household budgets at the moment, and it is only very reluctantly that we are introducing this modest £3 price increase.
“Cherwell was the last council in Oxfordshire to introduce a charge for the popular service. We want to keep it as affordable as we can for local people, not only to minimise the impact on individual households, but to continue to encourage people to recycle, which is a key environmental goal of ours.
“I hope this only has a minimal impact on our residents while supporting our high-performing waste and recycling services in the face of financial pressures that are beyond our control, such as the increased cost of fuel.
“Two thirds of our current customers signed up with the early bird discount and even with the price rise factored in, this coming year’s £39 discounted price is still £1 cheaper than the standard going rate for the current year. The other 33 per cent of customers could still get their licences for less money than they paid this year if they sign up before the end of February.”
Between March and the end of September, the council collected 6,987 tonnes of garden waste, averaging over 1,000 tonnes a month.
Of around 70,000 households, 40,325 in Cherwell’s area subscribe to the paid garden waste service.
Over 5,219 homes in the district have two or more brown bins. Additional licences for households who want to use more than one bin will be priced at £33 for the year from 1 March 2023, again an increase of just £3.
Subscribers to the service receive a welcome pack which includes a self-adhesive licence which they stick to their bin.
The waste collection crews are able to cross-check these against the subscriber list for each street as they drive around the district.
People can find the answers to frequently asked questions about the service and check their collection day on the recycling pages of our website.
From December they will also be able to sign up for the paid garden waste service.