Are YOU next for bin round misery?

A new clutch of local authorities are planning to drop the once-aweek rounds which many families consider essential.

That would mean a majority of councils operating "alternate weekly collection" systems, under which recyclable rubbish is collected one week, while the rest of the household waste is collected the following week.

This means that each type of rubbish is collected only once a fortnight - leading to smells, flies and vermin.

The Mail's study indicates that the 152 councils now operating this system will be joined by 12 more by next year and 30 others are likely to follow suit. A further ten local authorities declined to discuss their intentions.

This suggests that the 154 councils which intend to keep on collecting weekly will be heavily outnumbered.

The switchover planned to follow this week's local elections will affect the lives of millions. It will mean that more than half of homes will have lost the weekly collections which began in the Victorian era and seen them replaced with money- saving fortnightly pickups of perishable rubbish.

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Town hall officials have been advised by the Government, through its Waste and Resources Action Programme quango, to avoid discussing plans to reduce the frequency of rubbish collections during election periods.

The 52 councils which definitely plan to switch, are considering it or will not say make up about one in seven of local authorities in England and Wales.

The Daily Mail last week launched its Great Bin Revolt campaign to preserve the right to weekly household rubbish collections as Environment Secretary David Miliband began to press councils to surrender their responsibility to collect rubbish and pass it to unelected Joint Waste Authorities.

The new quangos will be able to cut back rubbish collections without risk of being penalised by voters. And councils will not be able to pull out of such a scheme once they have signed up.

Mr Miliband's officials have also advised councils to contract private firms to supply "bin police" who will hand out £100 on-the-spot fines to anyone breaking the demanding recycling and wheelie-bin rules applied as part of alternate weekly schemes. Targets can include quotas for numbers of fines handed out.

Despite the claim that fortnightly collections are essential to avert huge increases in council tax, it was claimed yesterday that town halls which have scrapped full weekly bin rounds have rewarded officials with big pay rises.

Those on six-figure salaries at 120 councils with fortnightly rubbish collections-have tripled in two years, according to research for the Sunday Telegraph.

The Mail's latest figures show that 152 councils operate fortnightly rubbish collections. The number is higher than the 144 given to Parliament by Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw on 16 April.

This is because the Government count was wrong in two ways. First, Mr Bradshaw named a number of authorities as running alternate weekly collections which in fact still have weekly collections.

These include King's Lynn and West Norfolk, Ashford in Kent, Dudley in the West Midlands, East Cambridgeshire, Mendip in Somerset and Rochford in Essex.

Mr Bradshaw also failed to name a number of authorities which have switched to fortnightly collections.

Most notable among those is Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, the Tory-controlled council led by Paul Bettison, environment chief and head cheerleader for fortnightly collections at the councils' umbrella body, the Local Government Association.

A spokesman for the LGA insisted: "We do not advocate one system over another. Councils should find what is best for their area."