Council spends £60,000 snooping through bins on early morning raids

A council sends snooping officials to rifle through the rubbish of taxpayers at a cost of £60,000 a year.

'Bin police' have been going through wheelie bins in 'dawn raids' in a bid to establish what type of rubbish was being thrown away.

Stunned residents were woken by council contractors emptying their bins into containers at 5.30am before driving off.

The scheme aims to find out levels of household recycling and what measures the local authority could introduce to improve waste disposal and treatment.

But residents have slammed the scheme run by Lancashire County Council as an invasion of their privacy and condemned it as a Big Brother-style intrusion.

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