“We’d Have Got Away With It, If It Wasn’t For Those Meddling Kids Taxpayers..!”

Councils were accused of a 'blatant con' after scrapping unpopular fortnightly rubbish collections but then slashing bin sizes.

The common 240litre containers for non-recyclable waste are being replaced with 140litre bins, which campaigners say are far too small for an average family's weekly refuse.

Anyone still want to argue that council staff aren’t petty little Hitlers, or spoiled brats used to getting their own way…?

Binmen will refuse to take away any extra rubbish, and repeat 'offenders' face the threat of prosecution and fines. Two councils have already made the switch to smaller bins, and it is feared many more will follow.

So, expect a great increase in the amount of flytipping, more families driving to the tip with their rubbish (thus adding to congestion and pollution) and some families resorting to sneaking out in the dead of night to dump their waste in or around their neighbour’s bins.

Except for the underclass, who don’t care and won’t pay any fines anyway, simply pleading ‘poverty’ or not turning up at court at all.

But Doretta Cocks, the founder of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, described the move to reduce bin sizes in return for ending fortnightly collections as a 'disgrace'. She said: 'It's a blatant con, but sadly one that is likely to catch on around the country.

'Councils make a big show of the fact that they're keeping or reintroducing weekly collections, and then casually add that the bins will now be much smaller’.

Yep, it’s the ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ strategy so much preferred by the unelected, unsackable little shits that control town halls all over the country now.

'Do they think we are all fools? Everyone can see that keeping weekly collections is a completely empty gesture if the bin is half the size. The 240litre bins are already too small for many families, so these much smaller ones will be a nightmare.

'I've spoken to parents who have been reduced to getting their children to jump up and down on bin bags in a desperate attempt to squeeze them into the bins.

'Families who cannot cram all their rubbish in will have to drive to the tip, which cannot make any sense for the environment.

'It will also lead to an increase in rubbish left on the street, which will mean more problems with rats, flies and smells.'

I’m tempted to suggest taxpayers should dump it at the council offices instead, but then that’s probably not fair on the rats and flies, who’d then be faced with competing against much larger vermin…

Roland Dibbs, deputy leader of the council, said: 'We trialled alternate weekly collections of rubbish but the public would not have it, so we went back to the drawing board.

'We really do need to make significant changes if we are to reach our recycling targets and this seemed the most sensible compromise.

'Our bins are now 20 years old and starting to show their age and will need to be changed, so it seemed a good opportunity to replace them with new 140litre bins.

'This encourages people to think about what they are throwing away, but responds to hygiene concerns about alternate weekly collections.'

Now, any normal person, faced with this problem of unacceptable collection schedules, would rethink the recycling targets accordingly. But not the local bureaucrats, who answer to a higher power than mere council taxpayers who keep them in a job – they answer to Brussels.

There is hope, though:

Last week solicitor Roger Houlker won a two-and-a-half-year battle against Congleton Borough Council to get an extra bin after saying that his family often produced too much rubbish to fit in the 240-litre container it provided.

The father of three claimed binmen would leave any extra rubbish bags on his driveway, where they were often ripped open by vermin, spreading the contents over the grounds of his six-bedroomed property.

The local government ombudsman found the council had failed to respond effectively to Mr Houlker's complaints or make any proper assessment of the volume of waste generated before making its decision, and ordered it to pay Mr Houlker £250.

Let’s hope we see a lot more Mr Houlkers out there, forcing these lazy pen-pushers to do the bidding of the people paying their wages, not the unelected gravy-train EU parasites.