MADAM – As a Tory, Neil Carmichael has a nerve to say in his column that “the Labour-led Stroud District Council has an appallingly low recycling rate”.

The Tories always had an abysmal record on SDC for recycling.

I was a Labour councillor on SDC for 13 years from 1995.

Labour ran the council for three years from 1997-2000.

During that time we took the recycling rate up from about 13 per cent to about 20 per cent and there it stuck after the Tories took control of the council again.

During the following 10 years, as Labour councillors in opposition, we called repeatedly for the Tory-led council to improve recycling.

After a survey done by David Drew revealed a high demand for cardboard and all plastics to be recycled at kerbside, the Labour Party even collected signatures on a petition and presented the petition to the council in 2009 to no avail.

The Audit Commission commented for several years that the council was failing on recycling – they said the council was not making improvements a priority and had no specific plans in place to achieve government recycling targets.

SDC was 98th in the country for recycling when Labour lost control in 2000 – we sank to 342nd for total recycling in 2010/11.

The Tories promised more cardboard banks and plastic banks on various occasions, nothing happened until after 2010.

In fact under the Labour-led council the collection of what’s called “dry” recycling is the best in Gloucestershire and one of the best in the UK.

Under the current Labour-led council recycling will be massively expanded in 2016 when a new contract sees Ubico take over from Veolia – this will mean the council will have an even higher overall recycling rate for all types of waste. (Mind you, all of this will be pointless if the Tory county council demands that waste collected by Stroud is thrown into their white elephant of an incinerator.)

Hilary Fowles

Cam