INDEX	August 18, 2025
Flies by night, and day!
Years ago I used to be a power in the land when it came to waste. I was a councillor at the time and someone somewhere clearly thought I was the right person when it came to talking rubbish. I lived in London then and Thatcher had decided to get rid of the GLC which meant we borough councillors had to take over the old GLC roles as well as running our own councils. So I joined the London Waste Regulation Authority and the North London Waste Authority. I also got to know Piers Corbyn, who was considerably more famous than his brother at the time. But that’s another story. Anyway one of the things I learned at the time was that the life cycle of the fly is about ten days. It takes them about ten days to go from maggot to breeding adult. For this reason if you are emptying general waste you need to do it every nine days or less. If you give the flies ten days or more they will multiply. No one seems to have learned that lesson in Millom since they aim to empty the general waste bins once a fortnight. This is daft but it’s not too much outside the ten day limit so it’s probably ok ish. The problem is that they don’t always manage to empty the bins on the due date. What happens then is that the bins have to wait a further two weeks to be emptied and that is definitely way outside the ten day limit. I imagine the service was privatised ages ago so it would be interesting to know the size of the financial penalties meted out for failing to honour the contract. But I doubt if there are any. At least no one can argue that there are no flies on Cumberland’s waste service.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	August 18, 2025