According to a new report complaints to West Lothian Council have plunged in the last year.
Operational Services which cover a wide range of public facing services such as bin collections, public transport and street cleansing reported a 37% fall.
Delivering his annual report on operations the head of service David Maule said: “Overall across the service, there has been a significant reduction in customer complaints over the last year, with overall complaints in the service reducing from 2,469 in 2024/25 to 1,557 in 2025/26.”
Waste collection traditionally generates the bulk of service complaints across the services council provides- from missed collection to changes in service.
It is one of the biggest services provided by any council. In West Lothian the budget for Waste and Recycling is £14.5 m for a department with 181 employees.
The council has faced flak in the recent past because of policy changes around waste collection which have now become embedded.
As the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) revealed, the council had more than 1,000 complaints lodged in the last three months of 2023. The bulk came from householders angry at missed bin collections as well as changes in opening hours at the county’s recycling centres which were introduced in October that year.
That number of complaints plummeted by 400 within a year, down to a range of factors including a milder winter.
Two early drivers of complaint were the cut in operating hours of the council’s Community Recycling Centres (CRC) and the introduction of charges to uplift garden waste.
The service is responsible for the collection and environmentally responsible management of all household waste. This includes waste collections to over 87,000 households, the provision of five household recycling centres and 145 glass recycling points.
Councillors still receive complaints about restricted opening at some of the recycling centres, including Linlithgow and Broxburn and Waste management teams continue to monitor usage. Last year officers agreed to reconsider an initial ban on vans using the CRC sites, something which predates the introduction of the booking service in October 2023
A report to the council’s Environment and Sustainability PDSP revealed: “Waste and Recycling Services has seen improvement in route completion, customer satisfaction and a decrease in customer complaints since moving to the 7-day waste collection service.”
The percentage of customers who rated the overall quality of the service provided by Waste Services positively has a current target of 82% and the end of year survey revealed the current value to be 85%.
By Stuart Sommerville, Local Democracy Reporter
