A DECISION to close recycling sites due to fly-tipping has raised fears of even more rubbish being tipped illegally.

West Oxfordshire District Council’s (WODC) cabinet agreed to the permanent removal of bring sites in a ‘structured and managed way’.

However, Wednesday’s decision is now subject to a formal call-in request, enabling a reconsideration of the move.

Concerns were raised at the meeting about the possible knock-on effect of further fly-tipping.

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District councillor for Chipping Norton, Laetisia Carter, said: “If something is so reliably used, how can we claim it to be redundant?

“This is going to be incredibly unpopular, I think it will push the problem [fly-tipping] to our laybys and our areas of outstanding natural beauty.”

During public participation in the meeting, Oxfordshire county councillor for Chipping Norton, Hilary Hibbert-Biles, asked the cabinet to defer the decision.

She said: “The fact these sites are overflowing is for two reasons: the first is obviously they’re well used, in which case, why close them?

“The second is perhaps not enough collection and clean-ups from the waste team.”

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However, Norman MacRae, WODC’s cabinet member for the environment, said bring sites had been made ‘redundant’ by the blue bin service.

He added: “In 2017, we introduced a fortnightly collection, recycling items on the doorstep of every household in the district. We have therefore made the community recycling sites redundant.

“For larger items like cookers and sofas we offer a bulky item collection service for a small fee.

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“The introduction of blue bins has proven to be successful, this has made the community sites redundant and now it is time to move forward and remove these facilities.

“The service has a very negative impact on the environment, the extra miles used by our vehicles add to our carbon footprint.”

Mr MacRae added that using CCTV to monitor fly-tipping and trade waste tipping would be expensive and to ‘garner prosecutable evidence is no easy task’.

Mr MacRae said other sites in West Oxfordshire had closed, resulting in no excessive fly-tipping, with councillor Merilyn Davies saying this was the case in Hanborough.