A restaurant in Western Road has been prosecuted by Brighton

and Hove City Council for depositing trade waste in a communal wheelie bin.

Vigilant council enforcement officers rifling through the bin's contents for illegal waste detected the crime. The situation is absurd. In any decent city, all waste - domestic and trade - would be collected by a single organisation, out and about early in the morning and in the city centre making a clean sweep of rubbish every day.

This is what many people will have seen happening during holidays abroad, or at least heard from their hotel rooms. This is why you don't see plastic bags lining the streets of European cities - nor the seagull, rat and fox feeding frenzies which we encourage here.

The present arrangements in which the council collects (or

pretends to collect) domestic waste and traders sign up (or pretend to sign up) with any one of 99

private waste removal contractors guarantees the streets are never rubbish-free.

In addition, these arrangements have now generated the pathetic squandering of taxpayers' money on bin patrols.

I doubt Brighton will ever be a half-way clean city. Traders pay business rates to the council and get next to nothing in return.

Rubbish collection is the least they could ask for. But our council would prefer to spend its money on patrolling rubbish bins rather than emptying them.

Trevor Pateman,

-Brighton