Decision Report 201400113

Summary

Mr C complained that the council had not collected his recycling bins for ten weeks over the festive period, and were ignoring his calls for an uplift. The council told him that there had been a backlog over that period. They arranged for an uplift, apologised for the delay and said that they would monitor this to ensure he was receiving regular collections. Despite this, they then failed to collect his bin in the eight weeks after his complaint, and he complained to us.

After we got in touch with the council about this, they wrote to Mr C to explain that the reason for the problems was that they did not have a key to the back court area. The refuse depot had a key, but the recycling depot had misplaced it. They arranged for a copy to be made, allowing the recycling team access to the bin area. They apologised for their service and the problems Mr C had experienced and said they would monitor the situation to ensure he received regular collections.

The council's policies say that recycling should be collected at least once a month and this did not happen. We noted that if when Mr C first complained the council had explained and apologised as they did later, and had they effectively monitored his collections as they said they would, he might not have needed to complain to us. As his recycling was not collected in accordance with the council's policies, we upheld the complaint but because they had already explained and apologised, we made only one recommendation.

Recommendations

We recommended that the council:

• monitor Mr C's recycling collections for the next three months to ensure that he receives regular monthly uplifts, and provide us with evidence of this monitoring on completion of this process.