Lincolnshire Conservatives will force a vote on Friday calling for the Reform administration's planned mandatory booking system at the county's recycling centres to be scrapped.
The move follows an FOI response showing the Council holds no recorded calculation or methodology behind a claimed £1 million annual saving, according to the Conservative group.
The booking system plans
Reform plans to require residents to book before every visit to all 11 household waste recycling centres, with the system due to start this autumn.
The business case approved by the Executive assumes that introducing booking will reduce the amount of waste presented at sites by 20%, a reduction said to account for forecast savings of £1.02 million a year in disposal and haulage costs.
Conservative concerns
According to the Conservatives' FOI response, the Council described the 20% assumption as based on professional judgement, information from other councils and industry sources, and verbal discussions for which no records were kept.
Conservative opposition leader Cllr Richard Davies said: "This policy is being sold to residents as an improvement, yet buried in the financial case is an assumption that 20% less waste will be brought to our recycling centres, saving the Council more than £1 million a year.
"We asked to see the evidence behind that figure. There isn't a calculation. There isn't a model. There isn't a methodology. The Council's own FOI response confirms that."
Cllr Davies highlighted that Lincoln and Bourne have congestion problems and commercial misuse needs tackling, but argued that increasing capacity, examining opening hours, and improving traffic flow should be priorities before restricting access.
Resident feedback ignored
The Council's own consultation attracted more than 2,000 responses. Residents identified reduced queues, more unloading space, improved traffic management, better signage and greater accessibility among the improvements they wanted.
The Conservatives pointed to differences between individual sites, noting the Council's July report recorded satisfaction of 91.1% at Market Rasen and 90.6% at Grantham, despite residents at those sites facing the same mandatory booking requirement.
