Council relents over second bin

Extra bin: 'goodwill gesture'

• Increase image
• View all images

A council has been forced to give a householder a second wheelie bin, following a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman.

Congleton BC, which has apologised to the resident, has also been told by the Ombudsman to pay £250 compensation and to review its waste collection policies.

The move follows a two-and-half year dispute where the resident complained that the council "consistently failed to collect" all his non-recyclable household waste and refused to supply him with a second wheeled bin.

But Congleton monitoring officer Peter Sutton said the decision to give the household a second bin was "exclusively a goodwill gesture" to compensate the man for the council's protracted handling of the matter – not an admission that its policy was illegal.

Mr Sutton said: "We operate a one bin per household policy unless there are exceptional circumstances – like, we understand, many other councils. In this case we did not think that there were exceptional circumstances." 

The report will be put to the council's standards committee on 1 October where decisions will be made about compensation and whether or not a review of its waste collection policy is appropriate.

Reports by the Ombudsman are not legally binding but, if a council refuses to carry out recommendations, the watchdog can force a council to pay for its proposals to be printed in the local newspaper.

The Local Government Association said it was too early to speculate on what the wider ramifications of the Ombudsman's report could be.