Despite years of promises and a £250million investment, ministers have concluded their bin promise cannot be met

A Tory pledge to bring back weekly rubbish collections is to be abandoned.

Despite years of promises and a £250million investment, ministers have concluded their bin promise cannot be met.

The costly scheme was supposed to encourage town halls to reverse the trend toward fortnightly collections. But none has reinstated weekly rounds and a number have scrapped them.

A Government source confirmed last night there would be ‘no new initiatives’ aimed at restoring weekly collections.

In opposition, the Conservatives made a high-profile pledge to restore the ‘fundamental right’ of families to have their bins emptied every seven days.

The promises continued in office, with Eric Pickles setting up the failed £250million scheme as Communities Secretary.

This funding looks certain to be axed in the autumn spending review because the Department for Communities and Local Government is facing budget cuts of up to 40 per cent.

Downing Street also wants the ministry to focus its efforts on house building.

‘It is a very expensive scheme and it has proved to be a pretty ineffective one,’ the source said last night.

‘It would be very surprising if it survives the spending review. There are other priorities. It’s time to move on.’

Emma Reynolds, Labour’s communities spokesman, said ministers had broken a clear promise.

‘David Cameron and Eric Pickles boasted that they would return weekly bin collections but their promises have been exposed as complete rubbish,’ she added.

‘What’s worse is the fact that the Government has wasted a quarter of a billion pounds on a scheme that has achieved nothing – money that could have been spent on other essential services such as care for the elderly.

‘The Government talks a good game on handing power to local people but in reality they spend their time dictating to local areas and wasting hundreds of millions of pounds in the process.

‘It is for local councils to take decisions on bin collection and for local people to hold them to account for those decisions.’

Critics accused David Cameron and Eric Pickles of lying to voters by boasting that they would reinstate weekly bin collections

Weekly household rubbish collections came into law in 1875. But the last Labour government gave councils the green light to shift to fortnightly collections to help meet EU recycling targets.

The move led to millions of people losing their weekly rounds – a development the Conservatives pledged to reverse.

Mr Pickles, who was knighted after being dropped from the Cabinet in the post-election reshuffle, was particularly outspoken on the issue, promising to declare war on what he called the ‘town hall Taliban’ – councils that cut rubbish collection services.

In 2012 he declared: ‘I believe it’s a fundamental right for every Englishman and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in the bin without having to wait two weeks for it to be collected.’

But despite the rhetoric, Mr Pickles ran into opposition from both the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and councils, which resented what they saw as Whitehall bullying.

THE GOVERNMENT'S ONGOING BETRAYAL OVER WEEKLY BIN COLLECTIONS In opposition, David Cameron and Eric Pickles repeatedly pledged to restore the ‘fundamental right’ to a weekly bin round, saying there was no 'plausible reason' why it should not be delivered. The last Labour government had given councils the green light to shift to fortnightly collections to help meet EU recycling targets Once in power, the Tory party unveiled a £250m scheme to allow local authorities to return to and support existing weekly collections, or to invest in schemes that would benefit the environment, such as by raising recycling rates. But Mr Pickles struggled to convince councils that already collected on a weekly basis to carry on doing so - let alone persuade those who axed them to have a rethink. Only around a third of the bids submitted by 2012 were aimed at retaining a weekly collection. Others sought funding for recycling services. In an added blow earlier this year, the only council to sign up to the original plan to revert from fortnightly to weekly collections decided not to continue. Stoke-on-Trent City Council was awarded £14.3m from the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2012 to revert to weekly household waste collections for a minimum of five years. But city officials decided the plans would be too expensive and that it fell foul of a new European Union waste directive. At the time same, The Mail also revealed that families have to wait 12 days on average for black bag rubbish to be collected. One study last year found that just 6 per cent of councils now operate weekly services. The Government disputes the figures, saying 14million homes in England still have a weekly collection of perishable rubbish ‘in some form’. Advertisement

Mr Pickles was successful in reducing the ability of over-zealous councils to fine households for minor errors, such as leaving a bin out on the wrong day. And he ended official guidance encouraging councils to shift to fortnightly collections.

But the Government made no progress on its central pledge to restore weekly bin rounds to the millions of families who had lost them.

In 2011, it launched the £250million ‘Weekly Collections Support Scheme’, offering financial help to councils to maintain or reintroduce weekly rubbish services.

But the scheme failed to persuade a single council to restore weekly collections, and the number of homes receiving only fortnightly services has continued to soar. One study last year found that just 6 per cent of councils now operate weekly services.

The Government disputes the figures, saying 14million homes in England still have a weekly collection of perishable rubbish ‘in some form’. Government sources say the situation would have been significantly worse without the £250million intervention.