North Devon Council compensates customers for service complaints

Compensation paid to disgruntled customers by North Devon Council totalled £1,547 last year.

It was stumped up after complaints about missed bin collections, parking and planning issues.

Council officers have power to agree compensation payments if customers have used excessive time and trouble to get their complaint resolved or where the investigating officer feels the complaint warrants a refund or compensation because of the impact the service failure has had.

Between April 2023 and March 2024, 13 properties received a total of £1,115 to compensate for missed bin/recycling collections and £30 to compensate for items mistakenly put into a refuse lorry by a crew member.

One planning customer received £250 when they didn’t receive the service they paid for and a parking customer received £1.20 as a refund relating to a parking app.

Fourteen customers had garden permits extended at a cost of £151 for missed garden waste collections.

Customers who experience ongoing issues after receiving compensation are entitled to escalate the issue to the local government ombudsman.

North Devon Council’s governance committee was told there were currently no waste and recycling cases with the ombudsman and most complaints were resolved without compensation being made.

In the last three months of the 2023/24 financial year the number of complaints to the council were down by a third to 80.

Changes in the waste and recycling rounds which had caused confusion on the routes had resulted in more complaints of this nature but they were picked up “in a timely manner” said head of customer focus Sarah Higgins.

She said only 0.3 per cent of collections were missed last year.