COUNCIL officials have insisted microchips embedded in Hull's wheelie bins will not be used to spy on what people throw away.

An investigation by campaign group Big Brother Watch found, unbeknownst to many residents, 68 councils had installed microchips in people's wheelie bins.

Hull City Council was among them.

It implanted Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in 11,000 brown bins – which are for garden waste and kitchen food waste – when it launched a trial collection scheme in 2007.

The council claims the chips have never been activated and were fitted at no extra cost to the taxpayer, during the manufacturing stage.

Big Brother Watch, a subsidiary of The Taxpayer's Alliance, believe microchips will eventually be activated in a nationwide pay-as-you-throw scheme.

A spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said: "Councils are preparing the technology at significant cost, ready for when the government announces a nationwide roll-out of charging for what the British public throw away."

Doug Sharp, waste development team leader at Hull City Council, said: "When we initially did the brown bin trial a couple of years back, the chips were starting to become popular.

"We did not have any intention of using them but we put them in 11,000 bins in case we wanted to use them in the future.

"This is because fitting them retrospectively would have been very difficult.

"However, we have not fitted any since. We recently rolled out 200,000 or so bins with the new system and none of them had chips.

"Hull's perspective is that we will not be using them."