All the excuses they give us for why you can never find a bin in the street are just a load of garbage

This article was first published in The Daily Mail.

Black bins, green bins, brown bins, red bins… tens of millions of them. Britain has become a nation of recycling bins.

But we still have nowhere to put our rubbish when we’re out and about.

Finding an ordinary litter bin on the street is increasingly impossible in many of our cities.

We’ve lived with the problem for so long that we’ve grown accustomed to the trash strewn about our pavements and parks. Many people simply ignore the problem.

But the disappearance of bins across the UK became painfully obvious to me as, just a few weeks ago, I headed to this year’s Conservative Party Conference.

Sharing a train from SW1 with a group of colleagues, we tucked into a picnic of ready-mixed G&Ts and Percy Pig sweets.

When we pulled into Manchester Piccadilly, I took it upon myself to collect the empty tins and plastic wrappers as a gesture of civic virtue. But, try as I might, I could not find a bin.

Eventually, somewhere near my hotel, I spotted one lone receptacle. But as I attempted to stuff my bag of rubbish inside, one of the tins bit back. A sharp edge caught my hand, leaving a nasty gash.

Nursing both my wound and my pride, I later vented my frustration on social media. The responses came swiftly. My ignorance, I was told, was staggering. Did I not know that bins had been removed from many public areas because of the IRA?

That terrorists had bombed Manchester in 1996? That the scarcity of bins was not a matter of litter management but national security?

That’s the official explanation. But as I began to investigate, it quickly became obvious that terrorism is merely a convenient excuse for councils to avoid spending money on keeping our towns and cities litter-free.

At first, I wondered whether I was being cynical. The threat of attacks, after all, is ever-present – and, for those unlucky enough to have been affected, a traumatic memory.

Better to have no bins at all, surely, than risk one being used as a weapon.

Time Out magazine, the bible of London’s entertainment industry, certainly accepts the explanation. Earlier this year it reported that the absence of litter bins was an imperative matter of public safety, citing the Bishopsgate bombing of 1993, in which one person was killed and 44 were injured.

That bomb, in fact, was in a lorry, not a litter bin. Yet City of London authorities removed more than 2,000 bins from the area in the aftermath. Two years earlier, a bomb in a litter bin at Victoria station had killed one person and wounded 38 others.

Explosive experts warned that concrete bins presented a particular danger. Just 100g of plastic explosive detonated inside such a rigid shell could project debris with lethal force for nearly 200 yards.

Horrified at the prospect, civic authorities ordered their mass removal.

If this was meant to be a temporary measure, it didn’t work out that way. Often, the bins never came back.

A survey in 2016 found the Square Mile, London’s financial centre, had just 46 public bins. Of these, 20 were added in 2013, after no doubt expensive ‘security assessments’.

Anyone who has ever tried to dispose of a coffee cup in that area will know that finding a bin is ridiculously difficult. The Square Mile’s 46 bins work out to roughly one per 10,000 inhabitants, once commuters are included.

But the problem is national. One project tracking bins in Yorkshire found a mere 32 in the city of Bradford.

Yet other countries seem to manage. Paris, with a population of 2.1 million, boasts more than 30,000 bins – one every 100 metres, one for every 70 people.

In New York, where litter baskets were temporarily removed in the wake of the 9/11 atrocities, the city’s sanitation department now maintains around 23,000 bins.

And in Tel Aviv, where the threat of terror attacks is constant, the concrete-and-steel bins are designed to be bomb-proof, with a ‘double-wall’ construction that channels the force of a blast upwards, protecting bystanders from shrapnel injuries.

These bins can contain an explosion so effectively that anyone standing 10 ft away should be safe.

Other measures are simpler – such as the one adopted by London’s Underground, which uses metal frames with transparent bags. Staff and passengers can easily see what’s inside.

So why isn’t this done in the City of London? Why not in Manchester or Bradford?

The answer, of course, is cost rather than security. Bins require emptying; emptying requires people; people require wages.

We’ve seen how dire the problem can be thanks to the waste disposal workers’ strike in Birmingham, which began last March and has still not been fully resolved. At its worst, this industrial action left around 20,000 tons of rubbish rotting on the streets.

If anything presents an opportunity for terrorists to plant bombs in plain sight, surely it is heaps of stinking bags, overstuffed wheelie bins and skips.

It is essential that litter-bin collections be funded properly because, if they’re not emptied regularly – and efficiently – waste quickly mounts up. The bins overflow and people start dumping black bags or fly-tipping other waste around them.

Many councils clearly think (though they would never admit it) that the easiest solution is to do without bins altogether.

They have used terrorism as an all-too-convenient excuse to keep the numbers down and maintenance contracts light. There is something dismally ‘Modern Britain’ about it: a policy born of fear, preserved by inertia, and then justified by budgetary caution.

The war on bins has been won, not by counter-terrorism units, but by local government accountants.

Yet the arguments beyond terrorism are equally spurious.

Some local authorities insist that fewer bins end up reducing litter by encouraging people to take their rubbish home. What a joke. Anyone who has ever walked home from a busy park after a sunny Saturday afternoon knows that this is nonsense.

What actually happens is that waste migrates. Cans are balanced on bollards, coffee cups are left in heaps like urban cairns and plastic bags are tied mournfully to railings.

This, in turn, inevitably requires more street-cleaning, which costs money – and so the supposed saving on bins is consumed by the greater cost of dealing with the mess that replaces them.

Other justifications are even feebler. According to one private rubbish collection firm in the capital, City Waste Clearance: ‘Bins can often be eyesores, especially in historical areas. Removing bins helps preserve the city’s charm.’

Its website also claims: ‘Bins take up valuable room on sidewalks [sic]. By not having bins, the city maximises space for pedestrians. This makes walking safer and more enjoyable.’

This wish to do away with bins tells us something about the broader decline of civic ambition. Victorian Britain provided public lavatories, gas lamps and libraries – visible symbols of municipal pride. The Britain of the 21st century can’t even manage a litter bin.

We have become a country more likely to commission a ‘smart bin trial’ – a bizarre move by Stratford-upon-Avon district council to collect ‘real-time data of deposited waste’ – than to go to the trouble of installing plain old bins.

And so the rubbish piles up.