A woman has hit out at Council bosses who banned her from using a household waste site - because she had made too many visits.

Jean Hayward, 58, of Thornton, was told on the last trip she made to the tip in Queensbury that she could no longer use the facility because staff had reported she had made more than 20 visits. She said Council employees working at the tip in Ford Hill approached during her last visit and said they thought it was about time they had a word with her.

"I could not think what I had done wrong," said Mrs Hayward. "Then they told me that I had visited the site 20 times and therefore I better make this my last visit."

Mrs Hayward said she was visiting the household waste site to dispose of garden waste because she was landscaping her back garden at her home in Hillcrest Road.

It follows appeals from the Council for people to recycle as much of their waste as possible and not dump rubbish illegally.

"My husband Harold, who is 64, has cancer of the throat and is not very well at the moment so we are trying to make the garden more manageable by landscaping it," said Mrs Hayward.

"I don't even know if I have made that many trips but I am genuinely not trying to abuse the service, I'm just trying to dispose of my waste properly."

Mrs Hayward, who works at a snooker club in Bradford, said it would be very easy to do what some other people did and dump their waste in beauty spots or at the side of a road.

"I would not dream of blighting the landscape by dumping my waste illegally so I don't expect to be penalised for trying to do the right thing," she said.

Mrs Hayward rang the Council to complain about what had happened and was told to use an alternative household waste site.

She said: "What is the point of that? If I use another tip I am just wasting petrol and harming the environment and costing myself a lot of time."

But Ian Bairstow, Bradford Council's head of service for the waste and street scene department, said people who used the service excessively would be "challenged".

"This resident has made around 20 trips to a household waste site with large amounts of excavated soil, rubble and garden waste," he said.

"We encourage everyone to recycle and offer free disposal facilities for householders who deliver reasonable amounts of household waste.

"We would expect residents with large amounts of this type of waste to hire a commercial skip."