A district council is withdrawing its weekly bulky waste freighter service – but its claims that it is all to increase the level of recycling have been disputed.

Tonbridge and Malling council had previously offered residents the chance to drop off large waste items at 55 locations around the borough on a Saturday.

The service has been suspended since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, but now the council has taken the decision that it will never re-start.

KCC had been paying the district an annual subsidy of £9,000 towards the cost of providing the 10 HGV drivers necessary to operate the service each week, but had withdrawn that subsidy since opening a new recycling centre at Allington in May this year.

Council officers reported that the freighter service, which had used two trucks, one for electrical and one for everything else, had collected nearly 6,000 tonnes of waste in the five years since 2016, but it had not been possible to sort the rubbish, so everything – apart from electrical items – had been sent for incineration rather than recycling.

In its last full year of operation, the freighter service had collected 72 tonnes of waste for recycling, while 1,553 tonnes had gone for incineration.

The council’s Conservative cabinet member for technical and waste services, Cllr Piers Montague, said: ‘‘This was a difficult decision, but faced with the facts on the service’s environmental impact, a vote to re-instate this service would be a vote to reverse our improving recycling rates."

He said: "Sending thousands of tonnes of rubbish for incineration, when much of it could be re-purposed, goes against our belief in doing everything we can to minimise the impact of waste."

But opposition councillors had a different take.

Cllr Mark Hood (Green) said: "All the opposition parties were opposed to this cut. The freighter was a valuable service for many, especially those without a vehicle to get to KCC's household waste recycling centres."

He said: "The fact is that Urbaser [the council's waste contractor] cannot meet the terms of its contract and does not have the capacity to deliver this service, and the council are letting them off the hook.

"It isn't about recycling rates, waste could easily be separated at the collection points into different streams.

"The opposition councillors asked for a public consultation on this issue before the service was ended, but the Conservative administration knew the likely result and went ahead and cut it anyway."

Cllr Green said that the borough had already seen an increase in fly-tipping, with residents commonly leaving items at the spot where the the freighter service used to visit.

He said: "The council thinks it is going to save money through this cut, but once it has allowed for the extra cost of dealing with the increased fly-tipping, it will be disappointed."

The council is proud of its recycling achievements.

A report carried out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) had shown that households across Tonbridge and Malling had recycled 51.6% of their rubbish in the past year. The average across Kent was 43%, while the national average for England was only 42%.

The record figures come in spite of problems which hit waste collections in Tonbridge and Malling and other council areas that year because of a shortage of HGV drivers, with recycling rounds halted for several weeks in the summer of 2021.

Resident Stacey Pilgrim said: "Since TMBC took the decision to discontinue this service, the local recycling centre at Longmead Park has become somewhat of a fly-tipper's paradise with the majority of waste that has been left there could have easily been removed and recycled had the service not been stopped."

The council's bookable bulky waste collection service will continue.

Households can pay a fee of £58 to have up to six bulky items collected from their door-step.

Households in receipt of council tax reduction benefits are given a discounted rate of £12.