Before now, I used to allow half an hour for visiting the tip at Throckmorton, including the journey time back and forth from my home in Cropthorne. This weekend, after half an hour I was not even inside the fence around the waste disposal area.

As I waited, one "user" drove in and dumped his bags next to the fence, another two drove past the whole queue and dumped their rubbish in the soil & rubble skips near the entrance. I didn't know about tip-rage before!

So just what has changed up there? The old site had typically 4 skips in use, 2 for green re-cycling and 2 for household waste. There was room for two cars alongside each skip, a total of 8 cars unloading simultaneously.

Crucially, there were also two more skips under covers that the operators could bring into service at peak times, thus servicing up to 12 cars unloading simultaneously.

The new skips with their linear queue can handle no more than 4 unloading vehicles. No matter how long is allowed for people "to get used to the new layout", the unloading capacity is reduced to one third of that of the original site.

The skips on the new site may be bigger and hold more, but far fewer people can get to them at any one time. The new design is hopelessly, and I expect expensively, flawed.

Peter Harris, The Granary, Cropthorne,