Fighting North Herts Council Rubbish Plans in North Hertfordshire

Like you, I rely on our local Council to keep our communities a place we can all be proud to call home, writes Hitchin MP Bim Afolami in his latest exclusive column for Nub News

Despite promising that they would review their Local Plan – and the protections it should give to our towns and villages – by the end of 2023, the Labour/Lib Dem Cabinet in North Herts have only belatedly voted to begin a full review at the start of 2024 – and then only after I had spent months campaigning for them to keep their promises to you.

Now, alongside their allies at Green/Lib Dem-run East Herts Council, they are doubling down on their plans to slash the bin services we need to keep our communities clean and tidy – free of litter, fly-tipping and waste in the streets.

Under their proposals, the Council's own Deputy Leader admits services "might not meet [residents'] wants". In addition to their previously mooted plans to slash your bin collections, leaving you with some of the worst bin collection services in our region, they now want to go further and slash street cleansing services, remove a huge number of public litter bins and leave fly-tipping on the roadside for longer.

Under Labour and the Lib Dems, Hitchin and the villages will become dirtier and smellier places to live, littering will increase, and the impacts of fly-tipping on our countryside will deepen. That's not what I want for the place my family and I call home. That's not my vision for the future of our communities. I'm sure it isn't yours either.

Keep Britain Tidy say that litter causes harm to wildlife. It can attract vermin. It contributes to further crime. And it makes people feel less safe.

I have a plan to make our area greener and safer. Working with the record numbers of police officers we have on the streets of Hertfordshire to drive down crime. Working to expand the protections for our beautiful countryside. But Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens are putting all of that at risk with their plans to slash waste services.

If you, like me, want to make our area somewhere we can all be proud to call home, come and join my team. Together, let's make Hitchin even better.