ON top of now rationing householders to just two bin bags, Pendle Council is chary of declaring as a success the scheme that expects 3,000 householders -- old folks included -- to cart their smelly refuse through their houses to deposit it outside their front doors for collection.

It's too early to decide whether the scheme is a winner, says principal waste management officer Brian Thompson.

In my opinion, it is not a moment too soon to accuse him of talking rubbish -- when the reason for the council's expectation that taxpayers should lug bags of stinking waste through their houses for the convenience of the council's binmen is because the bin wagon they have bought to service the homes in Earby, Reedley, Brierfield and Whitefield, Nelson, is too big to get down the back streets to their back doors.

Did nobody measure the width of this juggernaut before placing the order for it?

Oh, I know that it is specially designed to accommodate regular rubbish and recyclable waste.

But if its resultant bulk means it cannot get down the backs, why should taxpaying householders have to hump bin bags to their front doors -- and buy extra ones if they've more than enough refuse to fill two?

What's up with the binmen coming down the back streets to pick up and cart the bags themselves to the bin wagon?

Why should the taxpayers be expected to do the job for them -- especially the old and frail?

And have they forgotten the days when the binmen themselves used to heave heavy metal bins full of ashes and whatever to the dustcarts -- when now, it seems, they expect householders to both pay their wages and do their work for them?