I WAS staggered to read Mike Laycock's article "Former Lord Mayor puts his name to our petition" (September 15).

Mr Laycock's article stated that Coun Smallwood, the former Labour executive member for the environment, said "he warned chiefs three years ago they would need to tackle the issue of household waste, but claims his views were dismissed".

It is clear that somebody has the facts wrong.

Coun Smallwood was the executive member for the environment three years ago.

Are we to understand that Coun Smallwood warned himself and presumably took no notice? There were no plans for a garden collection scheme when Labour lost office.

Landfill tax was first paid by York's residents in 1996 under a Labour-controlled council. They did introduce a scheme for only 1,000 households to collect "dry recyclables". This took six years to increase to 25 per cent of the city.

In two years the Lib Dem-run council has increased this scheme to cover over 85 per cent of York's households and has been working in partnership with St Nicholas Field to increase this yet further to harder-to-reach properties.

Even now when in opposition Labour will still not actively support recycling in York.

The facts are that a failure by York to achieve the required diversion of waste from landfill will result in fines of £150 per tonne. The result will be a huge increase in everybody's council tax bill. Nobody states the obvious truth that Europe and more than 150 UK councils recycle in a very similar way.

What is different about York's residents?

Coun Martin Lancelott,

Chair of environment and sustainability,

City of York Council.

Updated: 11:15 Monday, October 03, 2005