Communal wheelie-bins will be placed in more than 140 city centre parking spaces if plans to drop doorstep rubbish collections are pushed through.

Up to 575 car-sized bins will be emptied daily in a scheme to clean up central Brighton and Hove.

City councillors are voting on the plan, which has had a successful two-year trial, next week.

Critics of the move say householders will not find out if they are affected until after the decision has been made.

Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors are calling on the Conservative administration to postpone the decision until people living on each street can be consulted.

The council proposes to roll out 575 bins to 27,000 households between Davigdor Road and the seafront and from Sackville Road in Hove to Boundary Road in Kemp Town by May next year.

While the scheme will cost £675,000, the council projects the new bins will save the city £970,000 by 2015.

The bins will be emptied up to six times a week, with graffiti removed within one hour of it being reported and enforcement action to stop traders using them for business waste.

The black metal containers, in which people can dump their rubbish at any time rather than wait for their weekly collection, are designed to keep seagulls and rats away from rotting food which is otherwise left in black bags on doorsteps.

Their supporters say putting them in parking spaces means they will blend in to the street scene rather than standing out in attractive areas.

The bins have already been trialled in Grand Parade, Waterloo Street, Powis Square, Bedford Square, Norfolk Square, Lansdowne Place, Marine Square, the Bristol Estate, Craven Vale, the Phoenix Estate and Hove Promenade.

The council reported about nine of of ten people said the bins were easy to use and made their street cleaner.

Refuse collectors CityClean said they received requests from 128 different streets not included in the scheme so far asking for the communal bins to be put in place.

Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Elgood carried out his own poll of householders in the Brunswick and Adelaide ward.

He found a narrow majority against the scheme, with 379 people opposing communal wheelie bins on their street and 361 people in favour.

Residents of Brunswick Square, Adelaide Crescent and Palmeira Square came out most strongly against the communal bins.

Coun Elgood said: "There is huge public concern over this and residents are worried over the lack of information.

"Where the bins have worked, it is because the council spent time working through the issues with residents. To simply impose them will discredit and undermine the scheme in roads where they would be beneficial."

Residents who responded to Coun Elgood's poll were concerned communal bins would be smelly, attract fly-tipping, take up scarce parking spaces and make the area unattractive.

Factors in the scheme's favour were that it would end the problem of seagulls ripping open black bin-bags, encourage recycling and clean up areas currently used to store bins.

Coun Geoffrey Theobald, the Conservative chair of the council's environment committee, told The Argus the bins would be placed sensitively in conservation areas.

The council intends to balance lost parking spaces by looking at areas where new ones can be brought into use.

The new bin collections are thought to be unworkable if some individual streets stick to the old system.

Coun Theobald said opposition to the scheme in the areas where it had been trialled fell away when householders noticed the impact they had on cleanliness.

The Labour group is planning to press the council to postpone its decision when the environment committee meets on Thursday September 13 so households can be consulted.

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