Council leaders look set to ignore thousands of people who have opposed the closure of Great Harwood tip.

County hall bosses have completed the review of a consultation which opened in the summer into plans to close four Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) across Lancashire and save around £520,000 a year.

After receiving petitions bearing more than 17,000 signatures and a further 4,656 individual letters, e-mail and web comments – more than 60 per cent of which were from Great Harwood protesters – officers have recommended no change to the original plans.

This would mean the closure of Great Harwood, Colne, Garstang and Bacup tips in March next year.

The nearest alternative is two and a half miles away at Whinney Hill, Altham. Great Harwood county councillor Ciaran Wells said it was "terrible" news for the town.

He said: "To send 67,000 extra journeys to Whinney Hill, burden the borough council with hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra enforcement and fly-tipping bills and steal this service from Great Harwood is a huge mistake.

"We have campaigned hard to keep the centre open and I would like to thank everybody who got involved, we showed that we care about our town and the environment. We are being let down."

John Duckworth, chairman of Great Harwood Regeneration Board, claimed the decision would worsen congestion at Altham tip, and be a blow to the town.

He said: "It seems obvious that if people are fly-tipping now it’s not going to improve the situation.

"I also know of people who have come from out of town to go to the HWRC and have seen all this shopping at Tesco, Morrisons and Aldi and said they will come here again. " Great Harwood campaigners presented a petition signed by 2,680 people, plus a total of 2,801 individual letters, email and web comments. The report states that 99.9 per cent of households will still be within 20 minutes of a tip.

A final decision will be taken by Lancashire County Council’s deputy leader Albert Atkinson.

It comes as new figures released by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs showed there were 1,248 incidents of fly-tipping in the borough during the 2010/2011 council year. Of this 73 per cent of the fly-tipped materials was made of household waste.

The statistics show that in 2009/2010 there were 1,466 cases and in 2008/2009 there were 1,898 incidents.