Oxford city councillors have pledged to clamp down on supermarkets which fail to retrieve shopping trolleys dumped in streets and gardens.

New legislation came into effect in April which aims to put pressure on supermarkets to introduce measures to prevent trolleys being taken. The legislation allows local authorities to charge up to £200 for every shopping trolley it picks up on the street and returns to the supermarket.

Green city councillor Sid Phelps said it was now time for the council to get tough.

Mr Phelps, a member of the environment scrutiny committee, said it had recommended that the council should start imposing fines on supermarkets and that this would now take place from October.

He said: "The situation has not been getting any better and we have got to the stage now where we need to take action. Tesco in Cowley Road was supposed to be issuing new trolleys that could not be moved too far from the store, but that does not seem to have happened and people are becoming less tolerant of this.

"The trolleys block the pavements and the cycle route at the back of Tesco. We will now set up a protocol whereby if a supermarket does not pick up a trolley in 24 hours then we will fine them.

"We have the provision under the law to do this and, by making it our policy, it will focus the minds of the big supermarkets."

City council spokesman Chris Lee said: "We will continue to work with the supermarkets to encourage them to recover their own trolleys.

"Council officers are also planning to visit local supermarkets to inform store managers of this authority's intention to implement the powers on shopping trolley collection in the Environmental Protection Act."

In February, it emerged that students were thought to be responsible for stealing more than £10,000 worth of trolleys from Tesco in Cowley Road in a six-week period. At one point the store was left with just 20 remaining.

Store manager Chris Rogers said at the time that the store had been chosen as one of a handful of supermarkets in the country to take part in a pilot scheme to try to prevent trolley theft.

He added that special super trolleys, featuring wheels that lock if they are taken a certain distance away from the store, would be introduced.

Between October and the end of December last year, 51 stolen trolleys were found dumped in Blackbird Leys, Rose Hill and Littlemore. Of those, 44 were stolen from Tesco's at the Cowley Retail Park.