CHARITY workers last night criticised a store's policy to destroy out-of-season children's shoes instead of donating them to a needy cause.

Sacks full of unwanted shoes were found in a skip near Clarks shoe shop, in Bondgate, Darlington, slashed so they could not be worn.

Johnnie Evans, 65, found about 40 pairs of shoes in a skip while walking through a car park off Bondgate last week with his ten-year-old granddaughter.

The Northern Echo returned to the same site yesterday to find more sacks of destroyed shoes.

Mr Evans, known locally as Johnnie the Book, said it was scandalous they had not been donated to one of the town's ten charity shops.

"My granddaughter and I were walking along and saw the shoes in the skip," he said. "She started looking at them. I told her she could only have one pair and I would give the others to a charity shop.

"But as soon as she picked one of them up, you could see it had been slashed to bits with a Stanley knife.

"It's scandalous. How many Bosnian children could have had shoes on their feet this winter if they had sent them there instead?"

Charity shops around Darlington echoed Mr Evans' sentiments.

A volunteer at the Butterwick Hospice for Children shop, in Skinnergate, said: "It is very wasteful. We sell shoes and are dedicated to helping children so they could have brought them here. Even if you sold them for £50, that's £50 that could have been well spent.

"There's a lot of waste in this world."

Volunteers at the Cancer Research UK shop, on High Row, said they did not agree with store policies of destroying unwanted goods.

One said: "I can never understand why they do that when they could be given to shops or people who have a use for them. A lot of people don't really understand charity and how it works and the good it can do."

The assistant manager of the shop said they were odd shoes, and it was Clarks policy to destroy them.

"It is old stock, it is stuff that is written off," she said. "We get rid of them at the end of the season because we can't sell them.