BOSSES at Bradford Council are facing questions about a new charging scheme for brown bins, after they extended an early-bird discount period not once but twice.

The authority is bringing in a new £35-a-year charge for the previously free garden waste collection service, as part of efforts to slash £61.5m from council budgets over two years.

But opposition councillors have questioned whether enough households have been willing to pay for the service for it to be a money-saver.

Councillor Rebecca Poulsen, opposition Conservative spokesman for the environment, said: “I think there are an awful lot of questions to answer on this one, because I wouldn’t say it’s been an unmitigated success.

“This is now twice it has been extended and if they had got everybody they expected signed up already, why is it being extended so much?”

Cllr Poulsen added that she had heard from many people who had wanted to pay for the service but had encountered problems when trying to sign up.

The authority had expected around a third of the 90,000 households with a brown bin to opt to pay to continue using it.

It was also hoping to attract new customers in areas which previously hadn’t had a garden waste collection.

New figures show that so far, 27,500 households have paid up for the service, including 2,500 customers who hadn’t had a brown bin before.

Councillor Sarah Ferriby, the authority’s new executive member for the environment, said the take-up levels so far were “encouraging”.

She said the early-bird discount had been extended because of the high volume of people who had enquired about the offer.

She said: “We thought it was right to give them the opportunity to get it at the early-bird rates.”

But Councillor Jeanette Sunderland, leader of the Liberal Democrat group, said she was concerned about what would happen to the garden waste of the thousands of households who decided not to pay for the service.

She said she suspected many people would simply put their garden waste in their normal bins, which would add to the authority’s landfill costs, a situation she called “the worst of all worlds”.

The new paid-for rounds will begin on Wednesday and the early-bird offer now runs until Tuesday.