One of the most senior Tories in Sussex says his party should face up to the realities of dealing with waste and drop its opposition to incinerators.

East Sussex County Council leader Peter Jones is happy to be at odds with Conservative Central Office and press ahead with what promises to be the most controversial decision he will have to make during the next three-and-a-half years.

The 56-year-old council leader is in combative mood as he approaches six months at the council's helm. His favourite targets are his own party, environmentalists and Transport Secretary Stephen Byers.

The Conservative Party's policy on incineration is simple: There should be a moratorium on building new incinerators until the science has been investigated and it is known they are safe.

Councillor Jones is having none of it. He said: "I disagree with the policy. I believe we have got to face up to the realities of this situation and deal with them.

"I have no problem with being at odds with the parliamentary party's position on this. We have to live in the real world and we have to live with the constraints of East Sussex."

Building burners at North Quay, Newhaven, and Mountfield Mine, near Robertsbridge, stirs high passions.

But he talks tough from his tiny office at Pelham House, Lewes. On opposition to incinerators, he said: "I would argue that there have been people who have wilfully been scaring the public unnecessarily by employing bad science and relating their arguments to old-style incinerators, which are banned and rightly so."

The office of the leader of a council with an annual budget of more than £400 million is small, the decorations sparse.

On Mr Jones's wall is a map showing all the English councils coloured in the controlling parties' colours of blue, red and yellow. There is a lot less blue than during the Tories' last high-water mark in the mid-Eighties, when Mr Jones sold his stockbroking business.

It left him time for politics. He stood for Parliament in Edinburgh in 1974, against Robin Cook. He is married to Jacqui Lait, formerly MP for Hastings, now MP for Beckenham.

The hard-boiled realities of politics are never far away.

He talks tough on the proposed South Downs national park.

He said: "We are totally opposed. It is ill-conceived.

It covers a huge area but, unlike other national parks, it covers an area where there are a lot of people living. There are 100,000 people living in that national park.

"I think it is Islington man's version of the countryside as a playground."

The Conservatives are institutionally opposed to the national park and the arguments he deploys against it would be unlikely to get past a jury.

The arguments have been drifting about for years: More visitors; more damage; a national park authority that takes power way from local people.

He underlines them with something guaranteed to wind up conservationists: "Ironically, the so-called aspiration to protect the countryside may get totally the opposite result."

There is more tough talk about hundreds of redundancies among council employees, inevitable if the council makes the promised six per cent cuts in next year's budget, with more to come.

He said: "Frankly, it is inevitable if you are making cuts, as we are doing, and we will have to do next year as well. It is difficult to give you the exact figure."

The pay-off, electorally at least, is small rises to the council tax. East Sussex has the highest council tax in the South-East and Mr Jones promises a "modest single-figure" rise.

If his council's well-documented budget problems are not enough, there is also the promise to regenerate Hastings, where average earnings are almost half that of the rest of the region.

For councillors such as him, the key to regeneration is new roads and Mr Byers' decision to scrap the Hastings and Bexhill bypasses was almost too much to bear.

Coun Jones said: "The whole community and the county had seen the bypass as hugely important to solving the very real transport problems of the Bexhill and Hastings area. To get that sort of body blow was quite a shock."

The decision to scrap the bypasses was taken for environmental reasons and Mr Jones readily acknowledges the road would have cut through sensitive areas.

The alternative, a smaller road around Bexhill that makes possible the same housing and business developments linked to the rejected proposals, has already been dubbed "son of the western bypass".

Coun Jones is as provocative as he is sure it should go ahead.

He said:"If you try to kill this road then you are condemning tens of thousands of families to poverty for eternity."

The rest of the regeneration package, including a new railway station at Wilting Farm, a university campus and better electronic links for the internet and e-commerce, are nothing if not ambitious.

But regeneration in the east of the county is competing with the west for a share of shrinking resources and the council's Tories have already had to fend off criticism the Liberal Democrat-voting west is not getting its fair share.

Lewes's new library is on hold after the council withdrew funding and the future of the Eastside business park in Newhaven looked shaky when the council said it would pull out unless the private sector took on more of the financial burden.

The accusation is unfair, he claims, emphasising the tough stance his administration took on the park won a better deal for council tax payers.