Gedling Borough Council has agreed to pay a resident £100 in compensation after a complaint was upheld by the Local Government Ombudsman about repeated missed bin collections.
The verdict, listed as maladministration and injustice, found “repeated failures” by the Labour-led authority to ensure a resident’s garden waste bins were collected following several complaints made against the council.
The initial complaint came in July 2020 when the affected resident, listed in reports as Mr D, contacted the authority about two missed garden waste bin collections.
A second complaint was made in September 2021 about further collections being missed, with Mr D stating he was given “different reasons why the bin was not collected”.
These reasons included obstruction of the street, something Mr D “felt was incorrect”, with the authority going on to admit “there were no obstructions causing missed collections on his street”.
The council says it issued two separate apologies to Mr D, including an indication that some service disruptions were caused by Covid-19, and that a waste supervisor would monitor collections from his property on a weekly basis.
The authority also admitted the problem had been with the “briefing of collection crews”, before further complaints about missed collections were submitted in October and November 2021.
These complaints around his concerns with the authority were raised with the Local Government Ombudsman.
After investigations of the case, an Ombudsman inspector upheld Mr D’s complaint and found the council’s handling of the situation had been “poor”.
The inspector recommended the authority should pay the resident £100 in compensation and refund him for his annual garden bin payments in 2020 and 2021.
The council has accepted these recommendations and accepted fault in handling Mr D’s complaints.
