Decision Report 201508449

Summary

Ms C complained that after moving into a new flat she experienced ongoing issues with her bins not being emptied by the council.

It was clear from the evidence that Ms C's bins were not collected on multiple occasions. We were satisfied that the council had taken steps to arrange bin collections when Ms C contacted them and also that they had made sure that the refuse crews and the supervisor were aware of the situation and the need to include Ms C's property on the weekly bin run. However, despite this, there were still occasions when Ms C's bins were not emptied.

The council provided a number of different reasons for the missed bin collections. We found that the reasons supplied by the council were confusing and inconsistent. However, the council later advised that the main issue was the lack of a working key to access the bin store in Ms C's property, which they had resolved. We considered it was unreasonable that the council had taken five months to resolve this and arrange access to the bin store. We therefore upheld Ms C's complaint and made two recommendations to address this.

Recommendations

We recommended that the council:

• apologise to Ms C for their repeated failure to collect her refuse; and
• conduct a review of bin collections at Ms C's property since the bin store key issue was resolved; inform us of the outcome of that review, and what, if any, further action is taken on collections that have been missed.