The government is scrapping Labour plans to make householders in England pay for throwing out too much rubbish. Instead, it wants councils to offer people rewards to recycle more of their waste. Garry Porter, of the Local Government Association, is pleased with the scheme and hopes "the days of punitive measures are gone".

Mr Porter told Today presenter John Humphrys that he hoped more councils would begin operating this type of scheme, which has already been trialled in Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire.

"I'm sure local authorities up and down the country are looking at it with interest to see how it rolls out," he said. "It's only been a partial pilot for 6,000 properties. I'm sure once we've got full sets of data for it, there'll be more councils taking it up."

But Alex Deane from the organisation Big Brother Watch told the programme that "to anyone concerned about privacy this government's giving with one hand and taking with the other: getting rid of pay-as-you-throw, which they announced this weekend, at the same time as they introduced this technology which has exactly the same capacity to record your waste habits.

"My fear, in the long term, this smiling face of environmentalism is really a mask for exactly the same technology being used to charge us for pay-as-we-throw."

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