COUNCILLOR JEAN Fooks should try to get her facts right. The pay-for brown wheelie bin service for garden waste she refers to (Oxford Mail, July 26), is proving remarkably successful.

More than 10,000 Oxford residents are already using the new brown bins or paper sacks. But Labour would never have got rid of the green hessian sack scheme for garden clippings were it not for Mrs Fooks’s disastrous Coalition Government.

The city council is seeing the Tory/Lib Dem Government cut our grant (where most of our money comes from) by a quarter over two years.

Charging £35 a year for garden waste collection seems the least harmful way of helping to balance the council budget.

We are indeed encouraging residents to use the brown wheelie bin rather than bags where they can.

Taking out the lifting makes the job much easier for our recycling teams and means fewer back injuries.

But 20 paper sacks is roughly equivalent to a brown bin used perhaps 20 times a year and not always filled to the top.

People on benefits, pay no charge regardless of whether they have a brown bin or a set of paper sacks.

If Mrs Fooks wants a free service for garden waste she must say how she is going to pay for it. We know very well that the Lib Dems promise one thing out of office and deliver quite another if they are elected.

So I’d like to thank Oxford people for sticking with recycling in these difficult times. The new garden waste scheme is flexible, popular and very reasonably priced.

JOHN TANNER Board Member for a Cleaner, Greener Oxford, Oxford city and Oxfordshire county councillor