Sidmouth pensioner’s charity sack outrage

A SIDMOUTH pensioner labelled finding up to 1,000 charity collection bags dumped in bushes as “dreadful”.

Granddad Frank Leach, 74, discovered three separate lots of NSPCC Clothes Aid sacks – which should have been used to benefit the cause – when he was cutting back brambles in his garden this week.

The Woolbrook Rise resident was outraged the charity could have been left out of pocket as a result.

Frank, a retired landscape gardener, think the bags were lobbed into bushes from a footpath that runs behind the street. “Whoever did it should be named and shamed - it’s dreadful,” said Frank.

“I’d say to have it done once is modern society, but this was three lots in three different places. It’s a bit callous to lob them in there like that.”

A spokesman for Clothes Aid said its contractors wouldn’t have dumped the sacks as they pay for the right to deliver them – and only recover costs by collecting donations.

“If they don’t go through letterboxes then you don’t get donations back. They have double value attached to them,” he said. “They must have been stolen or could have slipped out of our network somehow. We’re really sorry this has happened.”

Clothes Aid will investigate the incident.