PLANS to outsource rubbish collection in the Malvern Hills district will pose a threat to weekly black bag collections, a councillor has warned.

The district council's Conservative-led executive committee voted on Tuesday to join forces with Wychavon and Worcester City to privatise its rubbish collection and street sweeping services, a move which is projected to save £1.6 million a year across the three councils.

But at the meeting, Cllr Anthony Warburton warned that Malvern Hills would be the junior partner and that services would suffer.

He said: "I am not, as a matter of principle, against using private sector providers. I know, however, that doing so would put MHDC at the mercy of a market that prefers large customers, not small and disparate ones. These firms exist to provide services to towns and cities, not rural districts.

"We would have a restricted choice and would get what those contractors who were interested would offer and at their price. Fortnightly general waste collection would, eventually, be forced upon us. You are now confronted with the preliminaries of a proposal that would have just such a result, very much not something that our taxpayers want.

And Cllr Sarah Rouse said: "That there have been shortcomings in the management of the waste services cannot be disputed. But if our management is not capable of managing that process we should replace it with another one that is, not just give up and hand the whole thing over to someone else."

Cllr Melanie Baker said that residents will not care about who is picking up the rubbish, as long as the service is reliable.

A motion by Democratic group leader Julian Roskams urged committee members to send the proposal back for reconsideration.

He said: "The contractor will be in a position to extract maximum profit for minimum service, and there will be nothing we can do about it."

But it was rejected and members voted six to two, with two abstentions, to approve the "market testing" of the services.

The privatisation scheme was also approved this week by Worcester City Council's cabinet this week, paving the way to introduction in 2017.

In a statement made to the Gazette yesterday, Ivor Pumfrey, the council's head of community cervices said: “It is not possible through this process to do away with weekly collections. To do so would require a change of policy which would need to be put to and approved by full council.

“No suggestion like that has been made and the market testing is aimed at securing a contract based on the current weekly collection service.

"However, as part of the process we will be asking, if all three councils operated the same frequency of collection what the savings would be.

"That is only right to ensure we have all the facts and can maximise the savings to the taxpayer before any final decision is made.”