“DUMP your waste anywhere or drive extra miles to use a tip further from you. But don’t use ours!”

Hampshire County Council is clearly anxious to increase fly tipping since it has announced number plate recognition monitoring at its local Ringwood site on the doorstep of Verwood!

The Ringwood site is our local recycling centre. I live at St Ives about a mile and a half away. Now I find I can’t use the site and will have to drive to Wimborne instead! This applies although I have a BH24 postcode and a Ringwood, Hampshire, address. Residents of Verwood live just a mile away and were told they couldn’t use it either. Where’s the sense in any of this?

Many years ago the government changed the borders to the Avon River at Ringwood – and put a large lump of Ringwood addresses in Dorset. We didn’t want the change – but had to put up with it. So now Avon Castle, Matchams, Ashley Heath, St Leonards and St Ives residents will either have to trail over to Wimborne – polluting the universe with fuel fumes even more – or start flytipping! The area is already a flytipping area and I imagine it will increase.

Is there no sense? We were always assured that we would be able to continue to use the Ringwood site. But then, why did we believe any local authority or government body?

CELIA MARKER

St Ives, Ringwood

Dorset Council has since got in touch to say that Dorset residents are in fact allowed to use the Ringwood waste site at Somerley, adding: "We have made arrangements to continue free access for Dorset residents at the Somerley site.

"We issued a press release in early January that details what we’ve done."