A BID for weekly rubbish collections to be re-introduced was shot down by councillors who claimed it would confuse residents, increase landfill and cause recycling figures to drop back below 50 per cent.

Twenty-seven councillors voted against the new Conservative Party leader Darius Laws’ amendment to the coalition budget, which included allocating £200,000 to reintroduce weekly black bag collections with a two-bag limit.

In a last attempt, Mr Laws said: “Anyone who says to me you can have wheelie bins in the Dutch Quarter, I’ll show you, you can’t.

“It’s a polarised issue. It’s not straightforward but I’ve met three consecutive houses on Albert Street and after Christmas, they’ve all done tip runs.

“It is a seriously long-term issue. We need to look at concessions around peak times of the year when there might be an overload.

“It happened to me at Christmas. I didn’t want to have excess bags but because I wasn’t here, I missed the black sack collection and had a backlog.”

Tory Pauline Hazell, backing her party’s proposal, said the majority of Shrub End ward were for it too.

However, Julie Young (Lab), said the move would be a “retrograde step” and the council should be doing all it can to encourage recycling.

She added: “I’d rather have seen the Conservatives bring forward an amendment to put extra money into the rollout of wheelie bins because the people I speak to look at their neighbours and say, ‘They have wheelie bins, why haven’t we?’ so that is what should be focused on rather than going backwards.

“Colchester in the future will prove it had a sound judgement in terms of our waste strategy.”

Former waste portfolio holder, Dominic Graham (Lib Dem), who originally announced the divisive changes, said the collective aim was to reduce landfill and increase the amount of recycled waste.

“In the first six months it’s been more successful than we thought it could possibly be,” he said.

“We’ve got 33 per cent less waste going to landfill, we have got our recycling figures up to 55 per cent - we’ve never been above 50 per cent before.”

Continuing to hammer home on the numbers, a frustrated Lee Scordis (Lab) thanked Mr Laws for the amendment, but questioned why the Tories were “still going on about this issue when all the facts are against you”.

He said: “Your policy would add one bag to the fortnight which would add 26 bags per household a year. If I multiply that by 80,000, a rough estimation of households in the borough, that brings it to two million extra bags to our landfill.

“That’s our landfill tax going up astronomically, that’s us taking a step backwards and I think that’s reckless for us, reckless for the environment and reckless for the future.

The Labour councillor added: “We have to embrace this as a group and do what we can to educate residents.”

READ MORE: WE'LL BRING BACK WEEKLY WASTE COLLECTIONS