Dorset is looking increasingly likely to give in to Hampshire’s demands and pay to continue using the Somerley household recycling centre.

Every councillor representing wards in and around Verwood, West Moors, Ashley Heath, Alderholt and to the north of Ferndown has spoken in favour of making the payment for at least two years from next April.

The Dorset Council’s Place committee voted on Wednesday to recommend the move to the council’s Cabinet when it makes a final decision at the end of the month.

Councillors said it would be a nonsense to make local residents pay twice for the service, or to see them drive more than 30 miles to the nearest Dorset household recycling centre, at Wimborne, which is already cramped and frequently blocked by queuing traffic.

Committee members also learned that although more than £60,000 a year had been promised to the Hampshire council for Dorset residents to use the Somerley site, the money had never been paid.

One councillor said that, to his knowledge, that deal went back 5 or 6 years with the money being put aside year after year.

Members also heard that the estimated cost of disposing of extra rubbish, with the risk of fly tipping and bonfires as well, was likely to cost Dorset Council at least £144,000 extra a year if the Somerley tip was closed to Dorset residents.

Hampshire council say that more than half the user of their site come from surrounding areas – with 20,000 Dorset households within a five-mile radius of the site. It wants to levy a charge on Dorset Council for that use with an option to only allow registered Dorset residents to use the site, charging them each time from next year.

More than 1500 responses to a survey showed that 46% of respondents visit Somerley at least once a month; 86% are depositing bulky items that cannot fit into a bin while 59% of respondents say they will add more waste to their kerbside bins if they were no longer allowed to use the site, or had to pay extra.

The option to improve Wimborne HRC was investigated some years ago and rejected due to high costs. A new centre to serve East Dorset has been estimated at between £3 – 5 million.

Verwood councillor Toni Coombs said the issue of cross-border charging had started in London and ‘rippled out’ from there. She said the issue had caused a great deal of concern in the area as the recycling centre was less than a mile from the edge of Verwood and had been used for many years by residents in the area, without problem.

She suggested that the £60,000-plus payment for Hampshire which had been put aside for several years could be used to pay for residents to continue using Somerley for another two years. She said the estimated bill for seven Dorset post codes to use the facility had been put at under £200,000 a year,. An estimate before the committee put the figure for homes within a five-mile radius at £285,000 a year.

Another local councillor, Mike Dyer (West Moors and Three Legged Cross), backed the move to pay up: “Even five or six years ago we were supposed to be paying Hampshire. There should be five or six times £60,000 or so sat somewhere which we could use,” he said.

He claimed it would be ‘ridiculous’ for residents in the area to pay twice for a service they were already contributing to through their Dorset council tax and unreasonable to expect them to drive all the way to Wimborne to use a Dorset site.

Committee vice chair Cherry Brooks (Purbeck) said to risk additional bonfires, fly tipping, or long car journeys went against everything the council had signed up to when it declared a ‘climate emergency’ in May.

Cllr Robin Cook (Stour & Allen Vale) agreed all of the points and said that if the two-years were agreed with Hampshire the Dorset council should use the time to both investigate further ways of reducing waste and to also look again at a new household recycling centre for the area.

Proposing that the cabinet agreed to pay the Hampshire fees Cllr Simon Gibson (Verwood) said : “It’s a question of fairness. Everyone else in Dorset has free access to a household recycling centre, our systems need to be universal…if we ask some residents to pay twice for what others get for free the message is just about as wrong as you can get.”

But customer and community brief holder Cllr Tony Alford warned the committee: “To suggest that money is available is unrealistic…there will have to be some compensating savings made elsewhere if this goes ahead.”