Edinburgh Sucks! | What wasn’t in the Evening News

City Council

What wasn’t in the Evening News - A whistleblower hunt

By The Basa ⋅ April 13, 2006 ⋅

A senior source in the ‘Services for the Community’ which used to be the cleansing department has informed us of the current operating plan for the next month for their workers. All of this wasn’t published in the front page Evening News story “City recycles waste depot bid‘ tonight. Further, in true City of Edinburgh Council fashion there is now a witchhunt going on to find out who leaked the story to the Evening News.

In fact the Powderhall tip is presently (i.e. it is happening right now) moving all their plant equipment down to it’s new home in Leith and into the hands of a private company. The Powderhall JCB is already installed into it’s new home together with some other equipment.

Over the next couple of weeks, the workers at Powderhall have already been told that they must report to the private company Regenerate Scotland and teach their new immigrant Polish workforce how to use all the equipment. There is talks of both shifts of workers, who work a four days on four days off shift rota, taking industrial action.

Council workers have been waiting since late last week for the leaked story to come out. They are not happy because not only could this mean them losing their jobs after teaching the private company how to do the work, but when a small pilot project took place some months ago, council lorries were waiting two hours to ‘get tipped’ at Regenerate Scotland which is 12 times the time that is normally spent tipping at Powerderhall. Other complaints from council workers note that the Regenerate Scotland plant is overrun with rats.

Our source told us “There is no way that this scale of operation could happen without the knowledge of senior councillors as was reported in tonight’s Evening News. Do you really believe that council-owned equipment and council workers would go to work with a private company with the council footing the wage bill and no councillors had OK’d this.”

The source continued “The pilot project would have had to have the backing of some committee - for all the councillors to say that they knew nothing about this and every rank and file member of the Cleansing knew - that is just a load of what the Evening News called rubbish but we call sh*t.”

All of the cleansing workers have been told that they will soon have to go to the private company to tip their lorries so they are stocking up with DVD players for their lorries so they have something to do whilst waiting to be tipped.

We found it interesting that Councillor Donald “Teflon Don” Anderson wasn’t more scathing in his condemnation of his officials who, if Telfon Don is to be believed, seem to be running their own cartel system. If we were running a city and we found out that our officials were using staff and equipment paid for by the public purse to train a private company’s new immigrant workforce and make those council workers unemployed, we would be firing those officials forthwith and we would be informing he city’s taxpayers that we are in control of the city and not officials who could well be being paid with very thick brown envelopes.

What does he know that he is not telling us. As the Evening News article says, in October 2004 he did say “We need to be much more open and honest in the future” - but he didn’t state how far in the future this would start. Maybe that will happen when his cabal are tossed from power at the next elections.

More information will be forthcoming, we’re sure.

More Info: City recycles waste depot bid