In the week that the Oxfordshire Tories launched their county council election campaign, one imagines they could have done without the intervention of some of the local Tory MPs over the increasingly controversial plans to incinerate all of our waste.

The comments of the likes of Ed Vaizey, MP for Wantage, and Tony Baldry, MP for Banbury, will resonate particularly strongly at County Hall with elections only six weeks away.

The two represent constituencies that are earmarked for possible incinerators — one at Sutton Courtenay and one at Ardley — so it is no surprise to find them reflecting local concerns.

Mr Vaizey in particular has expressed himself robustly, going so far as to suggest that the county council should go back to the drawing board.

The fears of Mr Baldry that the county could end up with two incinerators instead of one, effectively incinerating the waste of other counties as well as our own, highlight the awkward way that the county council has chosen to deal with the waste issue.

We criticised County Hall some time ago for failing to take a lead on how it proposed to deal with Oxfordshire’s excess waste.

It was a long time before it formulated its policy, and, when it did, it effectively decided to leave it to the market. Private companies would be asked to come forward with the best solutions and the county council would be neutral.

We have ended up with two competing proposals for incineration, both seeking the county council’s contract and both seeking planning permission for separate sites.

We do not have enough technical knowledge to judge the rights and wrongs of this particular method of dealing with waste. Nor do we have the knowledge to judge whether it is ultimately safe or not.

What we do know is that there are plenty of people who either believe that it is not safe or that the evidence is unclear one way or the other.

The best you can say of the county council’s approach is that it has probably given us the cheapest option rather than the best, and that it could potentially lead to Oxfordshire becoming a centre for incineration.