BASILDON Council has been ordered to cough up £300 for stress caused to a resident by over a year of noisy early morning bin collections.

The Basildon resident, whose identify has not been revealed, won an ombudsman ruling against the council over failures to suitability investigate a noise nuisance complaint about private-contracted bin collections.

The collections, which began in June 2021, disturbed the individual three times a week between 4.30am and 5.30am, causing him disturbed sleep, stress and inconvenience, the hearing was told.

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The resident first complained on July 28, 2021, about the noise nuisance caused by the commercial bin collections near his home.

The council registered his concerns and spoke with both the commercial waste contractor and the shop, who agreed to reschedule collections after 7.00am with its subcontractor.

However, the issue persisted, the hearing was told, with the disgruntled resident making numerous complaints and taking several recordings of the disturbances.

The council was reportedly told that temporary drivers who had been drafted in during staff shortages were the cause of the early deliveries.

But over the following months, all the way up to July 2022, the early bin collections persisted, according to evidence presented to the hearing by the resident.

The ombudsman ruled the council had initially taken “suitable steps” to address the problem, however it had failed to ramp up efforts to tackle the collections after it was proven their informal approach was not providing results.

“While a council officer visited the site, there are no notes they tried to visit the property to try to witness the noise nuisance. This was a missed opportunity to review the evidence available and was fault,” the ombudsman ruled.

The council was ordered to create a plan to investigate the noise nuisance and take action to curtail the issues.

The ombudsman also ordered the council to write to the resident, explain its thinking, apologise and pay him £300 for the “inconvenience, frustration and stress caused by its mishandling of his complaint”.

A Basildon Council spokesman said: “…”