MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Member of Parliament for Manchester Southern Peter Bunting is calling for the management of solid waste to be returned to municipal corporations amid what he says are inefficiencies in garbage collection across the island.

“We should…put as many responsibilities on the local government as can be competently handled there, because they are closest and most responsive to the people,” Bunting said, sparking applause from the audience at the Manchester Municipal Corporation’s awards ceremony in Mandeville, Wednesday night.

Solid waste management was moved from the then parish councils following the passage of the National Solid Waste Management (NSWMA) Act in 2001 and the establishment of the NSWMA in March 2002.

The NSWMA subsidiary Southern Parks and Markets (SPM) is responsible for solid waste management in Manchester, Clarendon and St Elizabeth.

“I am not a fan of the NSWMA and the local cleansing authority… SPM. I believe that this is essentially a local government function and should be returned to local government,” Bunting added.

According to Bunting, councillors and Members of Parliament (MPs) receive constant complaints over garbage collection woes and that supports his call for municipal corporations to take on that role based on the principle.

“The principle I first came across in Catholic social teaching…essentially says that you put responsibility down to the lowest level at which it can be competently carried out. Now, public cleansing is fundamentally a local government function — street cleaning and garbage collection,” argued Bunting.

“Even if you have central landfills that are managed and serve regions, but in terms of basic things like street sweeping, garbage collection, it is most responsive to the local government authorities. And I believe that should be their responsibility, and people must understand that right now when they are complaining to their councillor or their MP, neither of us have any authority over garbage collection — it is all centralised — and I believe it is wrong, and I believe that policy should be changed,” added Bunting.

He charged that the NSWMA lacks efficiency in solid waste management and this could be better done by the municipal corporations.

“I believe we already have an administrative structure at the parish level that can easily incorporate public cleansing, the cleaning of our streets and collecting residential garbage. Setting up a whole new bureaucracy to do that when we already have a local council I think is unnecessary, it is duplicating functions and it is inefficient.

“Most importantly, it is unresponsive to the people. Those bureaucrats, those party apparatchiks who run these central entities, they don’t really care about what is happening at the local level in the way that the elected representatives care. I believe that this is something that we need to change and we need to eliminate a lot of these local parks and markets corporations and give that responsibility to the municipal corporation,” argued the businessman and veteran politician.