IF county councillors don't agree today to new conditions which will allow an extra 150 lorry loads of dead animals a week to be dumped at Calvert waste disposal site in Bucks, the Government will overrule them and make them do it anyway.

If that happens the carcasses that arrive could be infected with foot and mouth disease.

And that's blackmail, according to Margaret Dewar, the county councillor responsible for community issues in Buckinghamshire.

She said the Government was saying "if you don't do what we say, we will do it anyway".

The row erupted when members of the council's development control committee were asked to relax the rules governing disposal of animal carcasses at Calvert, so animals could be brought in by road from other places as well as from Buckinghamshire and the Cherwell district of Oxfordshire.

This was at the request of the site owners, Shanks, and the Environment Agency which had identified Calvert, in the north of the county, as somewhere that more carcasses could be dumped to help the foot and mouth crisis.

But the development control committee said "No", on the casting vote of chairman John Page, the councillor for Burnham and Old Beaconsfield. They were worried about pollution.

The first dead animals were brought into Calvert last month, but they were killed under the Livestock Welfare Scheme, which destroys animals which are old or cannot be looked after any longer, or are on farms next to those where there is an outbreak of foot and mouth

Cllr Dewar said the Government had made it clear that if the committee did not say yes this time the Government would take emergency powers and this would allow it to ship in infected, as well as uninfected, carcasses.

The recommendation to a special meeting of the development control committee today from officers is that the proposal should be allowed, but no infected animals should be brought in.

A letter from MAFF to Shanks makes it clear that the company is required to bury any animals sent to it under instruction from the Government.