A SOUTHMINSTER resident has expressed her anger at the Council after repeatedly having her rubbish collection missed.

Irene Burmingham, of Goldsands Road, Southminster, has not had her rubbish collected on time since the new system came in four weeks ago.

She has been forced to phone the council each week to report that her street has been forgotten.

Irene explained: “We have only been able to get our rubbish collected by phoning in.

“They did not come the first week of the new collections so I rang up and reported that my neighbours rubbish had not been collected as well as mine.

Even more frustrating for Irene is that she has been told she can only report her problem, and her neighbours will have to phone in individually.

This has often led to each house having its rubbish picked up on a different day.

“What I find ridiculous is you ring up, get put in a long queue, and then when you get through you get told that you can only report your home.

“That means that everyone in the street has to go through the same process making the queue longer.

“I’ve tried emailing but an automatic response says it could take four days for a reply which is completely unacceptable.

“They are collecting them one by one.

“It is causing more work and at the end of the day is costing us more money.

“Why would they want to answer 20 calls when they can just answer one?”

A spokesman for Maldon District Council said: “We are sorry that this resident has been missed more than once and appreciate that this is not an acceptable level of service.

“We have asked a Suez supervisor to visit and investigate.

“When a missed collection is reported to us, we are able to add a note on the system for the crews to check if a whole road might have been missed and to also double check surrounding properties.

“It was inevitable that there would be some disruption with such a large change to the service, but we hope that issues such as these will be resolved as soon as possible.”