You will remember that we announced a few days ago a survey on South Cambridgeshire District Council‘s proposed changes to winter green bin collections. This closed on Wednesday evening and we now have the results. We had a total of 147
full responses (and 34 incomplete responses which we’ve not included in the results) (According to the 2011 census there are 1,889 households in Milton so this sample represents about 7% of the total. We didn’t ask any question to try to normalise for any oddities in our sampling method (which essentially was anyone who reads milton-chat or Milton News) but we’ve no reason to think it isn’t broadly representative.).

You can find the full results here but it seems to us that the key points are:

• A majority of people are in favour of the proposal (about 60% to 40%, see page 2) and that split is pretty much exactly mirrored in the percentages of people who think they would be directly affected (page 6).
• Of the options we suggested for which three months should be picked the most popular option, by some way, was Start of December to end of February (page 3).
• There were many well reasoned responses to the “Do you have any further thoughts about this issue” (pages 7-10) which are worth reading. Issues raised there included a strong demand for the blue bin and a fear that the consequence of the four weekly green bin collection will be that green waste will end up in the black bin.

The results have been passed on to SCDC and we have had a reply from Cllr Mick Martin, Health and Environmental Services Portfolio Holder at SCDC which was CCed to the rest of the cabinet and key officers. He wrote:

Thank you for sight of your village survey. There are some very good points made in the comments, and they will be taken into account as we refine our plans.

So thank you to everyone who took part: it looks like it was a worthwhile exercise.