We offer a garden waste collection service for £55 a year. You can register for this service now.

We estimate that, prior to the introduction of the annual charge, only around a third of the district (15,000 homes) actually used their green bins for garden waste, so we had bin lorries driving around North Devon to pick them up when two out of three homes either hadn't put them out or had put them out practically empty.

Collecting garden waste is a discretionary service (which means we are not legally obliged to provide it). Applying a small annual charge to garden waste collections has meant we've been able to afford to continue providing a service, and only those who wish to sign up need to pay for it.

Together with the other changes to our waste and recycling service in June 2017 (including a weekly food waste collection service and the possibility of changing black wheelie bin collections to once every three weeks), this is helping us to:

• reduce the cost of the overall service to help meet our financial savings target of at least 340,000 pounds in order to prevent further cuts to our vital frontline services
• help meet national recycling targets - 50 percent of all household waste to be recycled by 2020 (in 2017 we recycled 44 percent)
• increase the amount and type of recyclable materials that we can collect every week