Why council must take the rap for this shambles

The town's ever-active gulls ensured that soiled nappies dumped in bin-liners at the roadside overnight by desperate flat-dwellers spilled their contents over town centre pavements on Monday.

This filth littered the town until Monday's demonstration by bin-men and street-sweepers was resolved.

A messy month has passed since Rother's kerbside recycling scheme went live and still the confusion, muddle and sheer cussedness of it all is the talking-point in town.

And with good reason.

The public has every right to continue to protest. And it is right that those complaints should be levelled at the Town Hall.

While it is true that, in purely practical terms, the success or failure of the new system rests entirely with Verdant as Rother's contractors, the buck stops with Rother.

They employed them.

We were assured by Envirocomms, the consultants employed by Rother to put across its recycling message, that because Rother was a late-starter in kerbside recycling valuable lessons had been learned from those authorities which had pioneered such scheme.

Really? Then why haven't those lessons been put into effect?

We were assured that a sympathetic ear would be given to those householders with a "special case."

But if - despite extra staffing - the helpline is so overloaded that callers can't get through then road-side bin-liners loaded with nappies are an inevitable result.

If the continuing crisis serves any useful purpose at all it will be a wake-up call to the community.

One look at photographs taken only a couple of decades ago shows a cleaner, smarter town.

We have allowed ourselves to be bamboozled by yearly belt-tightening budget speeches into accepting the second-rate.

True, local authorities like Rother have been screwed-down financially by central government.

But at the heart of the issue is supervision. Control over standards was tighter when local authorities employed their own teams and did their own work.

The economic principle that work can be done properly at less cost by private enterprise applies only when contract clauses define tasks without ambiguity and are effectively enforced.