Issue - Big Houses and CO2

The facts:

1. Many Sutton residents pride themselves on their green image and recycle to a high degree. We have a high recycling rate for an urban area at nearly 30%.

2. If we published ward recycling breakdowns we would see that people in larger properties had the highest recycling rates and people in flatted social housing had a much lower recycling rate.

However a British Gas Report published in the Standard on 30 May showed that Sutton was the 6th highest generator of carbon dioxide (the big problem at the heart of climate change and global warming) in London.

More worryingly boroughs like Bromley and Richmond, that are most like the highest recycling areas of the borough of Sutton were in the top 3 worst performers, whilst Camden and Barking and Dagenham (similar to our social housing stock) were the in the top 4 best performers.

In other words if you live in a big house in Cheam you can do a lot of recycling, but your choice of housing may not be helping tackle climate change, whilst ironically people have probably no choice to live in what are low recycling areas are probably our best performers. At some stage when some bright spark wants to penalise them for their low recycling, I will point out this irony.

All this should cause some agonising at dinner parties over the fair-trade South African wine!

This long-term issue is one that we clearly need to debate when we consider the planning options the borough faces.