Shepton Mallet residents will soon have to pay more to have their waste collected – including their garden waste.

The Somerset Waste Partnership (SWP) will be raising the fees it charges for residents to have bulky items collected at the kerbside – as well as the cost of disposing of certain items at the county's recycling centres.

The charges for garden waste bins and collections will also go up – just one year on from when they were cut by five per cent following a change in contractor.

The SWP has said the charges will not lead to a rise in fly-tipping and reflect the pressures of both inflation and the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

Details of the new fees and charges were published ahead of a virtual meeting of the Somerset waste board tomorrow (September 25).

Contracts manager Colin Mercer said the decision to raise garden waste charges had been largely been the result of the pandemic's timing.

He said in his written report: "When we transferred to a new collection contractor in April, the planned changes to the garden waste service… members took the opportunity to offer customers a reduction in the charges applied last year.

"However, as a result of this unfortunate timing it is the service which suffered the greatest immediate negative impact from Covid-19.

"During the initial stages of the current pandemic, we took the decision to suspend the garden waste service and to transfer these resources into supporting the core refuse and recycling services."

From April 2021, the price of garden waste collections for those with a green bin will rise from £55.50 to £57.20 a year – a rise of just over three per cent.

For customers opting for ten garden sacks instead, the cost will rise from £27.50 to £28.30 per year.

For bulky waste collections, the SWP will now charge £61.80 for up to the first three items and a further £15.50 for up to a further five items.

Those looking to get rid of asbestos (up to a maximum of 16 sheets or one tonne at any one time) will see the cost rise from £249.60 to £255.70.

At recycling centres, the charge for disposing of tyres will rise from £3.90 to £4 for an unrimmed tyre or from £5.20 to £5.30 for a rimmed tyre – though the cost of disposing of lorry tyres will be around ten times as much as the latter.

There will be similar rises in price for sacks of soil or hardcore, gas bottles, individual sheets of asbestos and sacks of plasterboard.

Mr Mercer said he was unconvinced that rising the prices charged for these items would lead to a rise in fly-tipping.

He said in his written report: "For tyres and plasterboard, Somerset is slightly cheaper than our neighbouring authority average, whereas for asbestos and rubble we are slightly above the average cost.

"For the latter, this is balanced against offering our residents free disposal for rubble up to the equivalent of a single carrier bag.

"While the imposition of charges could be construed as a reason to encourage residents to do something else with their waste (such as fly-tipping), the numbers and tonnages don't support this.

"For example, we've seen a year-on-year rise in the amount of rubble accepted at the recycling sites while the number of total fly-tipping incidents county-wide (including rubble) has been on the decline."

Between 2017/18 and 2019/20, the amount of rubble accepted at Somerset's 16 recycling centres rose from 2,727 tonnes to 3,166 tonnes.

In the same period, the number of recorded fly-tipping incidents across the county fell from 4,629 to 3,413.

The new charges will be in force across all four Somerset districts from April 1, 2021.