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

New legislation came into effect in April which aims to put pressure on supermarkets to introduce measures to prevent trolleys being taken.

But Green city councillor Sid Phelps said the trolleys were still littering the streets and it was time for the council to get tough.

Included in the legislation is a clause which allows local authorities to charge up to £200 for every shopping trolley it picks up on the street and returns to the supermarket.

Mr Phelps, a member of the council's environment scrutiny committee, said the committee 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 radius of 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."

Chris Lee, a spokesman for Oxford City Council, 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 between October and December.

The trolleys continued to disappear and at one point the store was left with just 20 remaining.

The situation got so bad that the store has run out of trolleys on several occasions - with shoppers forced to carry four or five baskets for their groceries.

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 the Tesco store at Cowley Retail Park.

At the time, a Tesco spokesman blamed drunken revellers for stealing trolleys.

A spokesman for Tesco in Cowley Road said last night: "Our trolleys are still taken from time to time, but at the moment we have got enough to go round."