A council has been ordered to pay £300 in compensation - after a complaint about noisy binmen.
A resident in Basildon won an ombudsman ruling over council failures to suitability investigate a noise nuisance complaint about private-contracted bin collections.
The collections, which began in June 2021, disturbed the unnamed individual three times a week between 4.30am and 5.30am.
The hearing was told it caused him disturbed sleep, stress and inconvenience.
The resident first complained about the noise nuisance caused by the commercial bin collections near his home in the Essex town on July 2021.
The council registered his concerns and spoke with both the commercial waste contractor and the shop, who agreed to reschedule collections after 7am 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 its informal approach was not providing results.
The ombudsman ruled: “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 [a] fault."
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 council spokesperson said: "We accept the findings of the ombudsman's report and apologise to the complainant for failing to suitably investigate a noise nuisance complaint.
"The council is acting on the recommendations from the report and has formally contacted the customer in writing as agreed."
