Households which try and put out too much rubbish under a planned new waste collection service will be investigated.

Cornwall Council is set to change how rubbish is collected, with recycling moving to a weekly collection and black bags to be picked up fortnightly.

Under the changes, which will start to be introduced in June 2021, households will be restricted to one wheelie bin or a seagull proof sack for their black bag waste.

And council bosses have revealed that if households try to get around the rules they will investigate.

Peter Marsh, service director for the environment, was responding to questions at an all-member briefing about the new contract this afternoon.

Conservative councillor Stephen Rushworth asked what would stop people from putting extra waste out or putting rubbish in their neighbours’ bins.

Mr Marsh said households would only be able to use the wheelie bins or sacks that would be provided by the council and any extra bags placed alongside would not be collected.

He added: “If there are additional containers there will be some work to identify who is doing that as we won’t have the capacity to deal with extra levels of waste.

“We will be able to identify, hopefully, the proper sacks and wheelie bins and which properties they are from.”

Liberal Democrat councillor Sue James told the briefing that residents in her area “haven’t got a problem, largely, with the switching to weekly recycling and fortnightly black bags”.

In fact she said there was some frustration and disappointment that the new system was not starting until 2021.

However she said there were concerns over plans by the council to remove community recycling points.

She explained that in St Just there was a point close to flats and terraced houses where people said they did not have space to store the bags and box for recycling. She asked whether the points could be retained.

Mr Marsh said the council had found that the points had been “abused” by people who had used them to dispose of large numbers of glass bottles and big bundles of cardboard.

He said the officers’ view was that they would no longer be needed with the new recycling collections and there were plans to remove them once the weekly collections start.

Mebyon Kernow councillor Andrew Long said a community litter picking group he is involved with had found they were having to pick up rubbish which had been put out for recycling but had fallen out of the collection lorries.

Mr Marsh said that this was a known issue and assured councillors that they would be looking to use vehicles which had closed sides to prevent waste from falling out.

Council deputy leader Adam Paynter told the briefing that the implementation of the new service had been delayed due to an issue with acquiring the new vehicles. However he said that doing it in a staged process would ensure it would be more smooth.

The new contract is due to start in April 2020, but the new weekly recycling and fortnightly black bag collections will not start until June 2021 and is expected to be fully rolled out by May 2022.

Under the new contract there will also be a weekly food waste collection service.

Cornwall currently recycles just over 38 per cent of its waste but the council is aiming to increase this to 55 per cent by 2023/24.

As well as rubbish and recycling collection the new contract will also cover council waste collection; street and open space cleaning; fly tipping, graffiti, dead animal and fly posting removal.

Cornwall Council is due to meet on Tuesday, when it will be asked to approve increasing the council’s capital funding by £62million to fund the purchase of vehicles and new facilities for the new contract.