Middlewich residents have to drive past their local waste centre to take rubbish to the Crewe tip only for it to be then transported back to the town, a councillor said.

Cllr Garnet Marshall (Ind) spoke of the irony of Cheshire East's decision to close the Croxton Lane site at Middlewich and not allow residents access to the Ansa waste transfer site on Cledford Lane, where the entire borough's rubbish is dumped.

"We currently have the biggest HWRC site in East Cheshire but it's out of bounds to Middlewich residents, save for a Saturday morning once a month [mobile tip] and there's no guarantee this will continue," he told the recent meeting of Cheshire East's environment and communities committee.

"So therefore people like me will have to drive past this in order to take rubbish to another site which will end up back in Middlewich, which is crazy."

The angry councillor was scathing of the way the council had handled the 'temporary' closures of the three HWRCs at Middlewich, Bollington and Poynton.

Those are all now closed permanently following the decision by the environment and communities committee yesterday.

"Describing the closure of the Croxton Lane site in the summer as a temporary measure could be seen as, at best, misleading and at worst, disingenuous," he told the committee.

"The report before the committee was clearly being worked on and finalised when these statements were being made, leaving people like me to carry the can."

And he said the council had used the statistics for usage of the seven tips across the borough, to 'bolster a weak argument' for closure.

"On closer scrutiny of these figures, there is a perfect correlation between the number of residents in these towns – with Crewe being the biggest and at the top [of visitor numbers] – and some of the smallest resident populations are at the bottom, so statistics are used in this way to bolster a case for the closure of the bottom three," said Cllr Marshall.

Tom Shuttleworth, interim director of environment and neighbourhood services, said the Ansa site was a waste transfer station and not suitable for members of the public to use as a tip.

He said there would also be safety issues with bin lorries going to and from the site.

Cheshire East Council is facing a £27m overspend at the end of this year and needs to save £100m over the next four-year period.

This is mainly due to large overspends on social care for adults and children.

Councillors voted by eight to five yesterday to permanently close the HWRCs at Middlewich, Poynton and Bollington, leaving just Crewe, Knutsford, Macclesfield and Alsager tips open in the borough.

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