AN EAST Oxford resident has challenged city councillors to reinstate weekly waste collection, citing an old Public Health Act to support his case.

Justin Walden has complained repeatedly about fortnightly rubbish collections, introduced last October.

According to Mr Walden, council staff fail to put wheelie bins back in residents' front gardens in Hurst Street and frequently block his path.

He has also complained that bins are left littering pavements, creating trip hazards for residents.

After Mr Walden was told to complain to the Local Government Ombudsman, he contacted Andrew Smith, MP for Oxford East, to suggest that the Public Health Act 1875 prevented local authorities from abandoning weekly collections.

He said: "I can find no information when or if this Act was repealed, and therefore consider that councils across the UK could be breaking the law.

"Mr Smith has replied to my concerns and has passed this information on to Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment, in the hope of getting a definitive answer as to whether the Act is still in force.

"As far as I am concerned the fortnightly waste collection is not working in East Oxford and it never will."

Ian Wright, public health team manager for the city council, said: "Mr Walden is correct in that under Section 43 of the Public Health Act 1875, an occupier of a house could write to the council and require them to remove house refuse within seven days, or the council had to pay them five shillings for every day it wasn't collected."

Mr Wright said the same section was included in the Public Health Act 1936 but repealed by the Control of Pollution Act 1974.

The duty to collect household waste is included in Section 45 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 - which makes no reference to collection timescales.

Jean Fooks, the council's executive member for a cleaner city, said: "We are aware of Mr Walden's concerns and we have been having a blitz in East Oxford to try to address them.

"The 1875 Act has been superseded by other legislation, so there is now no requirement to collect waste weekly - we can collect what we want when we want. We are looking carefully at the introduction of a weekly food waste collection."