Almost 1,000 complaints were made to Telford & Wrekin Council regarding problems with services in 12 months, new figures revealed today.

The 926 complaints lodged with the authority from March 2010 to April 2011 range from grievances about bin collections to problems with child services. The figures will be presented to the authority’s audit committee.

The report to the committee, which will sit on Monday, also shows the number of compliments paid to Telford & Wrekin over services was 574.

Richard Overton, the council’s deputy leader, admitted complaints from members of the public had increased from previous years.

But he claimed this had actually helped improve services.

He said: “The council works hard to ensure that the public are aware of how to make complaints, enquiries and comments about the services that they receive.

“This inevitably leads to increased numbers of complaints.

“However, this helps us to identify areas for service improvement in order to continually improve our customer services.

“The number of complaints upheld has dropped since 2009 which shows that service improvements are taking place.

“For example, in refuse and kerbside collections only 136 complaints were received out of 3.5 million collections per annum.

“This represents 0.004 per cent of those who receive that service.”

The report also shows in 14 areas council bosses set a target of responding to 83 per cent of complaints within ten days.

They hit this target in only two areas – property and ICT and customer, leisure and libraries.

Mr Overton added: “Local performance indicators set the 83 per cent target that states that all complaints from the public should be responded to within 10 working days.

“The time scale for responding to complaints was previously 20 working days and has been reduced since September 2008, making our response rate much quicker than it ever has been before.

“We always do our best to keep customers informed of the progress of their complaint or query.

“On occasions we may negotiate a little more time to ensure a thorough investigation,” he added.