Sir - It was good of councillor Jean Fooks, the rubbish Czarina of Oxford, to answer in your columns (Letters, August 3) the many people who have been complaining to her.

However, her long letter does not seem to actually answer the complaints that people are making. Nobody is complaining that she is succeeding in sending less to landfill, increasing recycling, reducing global warming, and making an impact on climate change.

What seems a little unfair is that the environment of the whole planet should improve at the expense of the local environment of a few relatively underprivileged areas of Oxford, when this is unnecessary.

The council could have increased recycling while still not cluttering people's paths and public pavements with emptied wheelie bins and deliberately uncollected rubbish.

Ms Fooks writes: "But there are many who remember what it used to be like when the majority of homes put out black sacks of rubbish on the streets every week." Well, yes and no.

The majority had their own discreet dustbins, and sometimes put out excess rubbish in black sacks. The dustbins were generally replaced much where they had come from, and I do not remember them constituting any problem. The black sacks of rubbish were only around for a few hours, and the dustmen then took them away.

Now the green wheelie bins are left by the dustmen on the pavement or blocking the path to the front door, and they are a huge nuisance. When people do use black bags, the dustmen do not take them, but leave them cluttering up the streets and front gardens. That is the official instruction, apparently. I don't all see this as the improvement that Jean Fooks does, but of course she doesn't live here.

Roger Moreton, East Oxford