The Quarterly Complaints Report, put forward by the Performance Monitoring Scrutiny Panel, at a meeting held at the town hall on Tuesday (June 23) revealed 220 complaints had been made, with more than 100 related to refuse and recycling service.

Six racist incidents were recorded during the last quarter.

Townsfolk also complained about customer services, community services, arts, environmental health, strategic housing, planning and more than 30 complained about Crawley Homes, despite council bosses efforts to revamp the system after it was given a zero star rating by the Audit Commissions report last year.

But Phil Rogers, director of community services, at the council said the complaints had been so high for amenity services, because of the snow in February and 'teething problems' with the new green bins.

He said: "There were two issues that influenced the number of complaints this time.

"We had an awful lot of severe snowy weather, and the refuse trucks were struggling to get through it, which meant a lot of properties were affected. There bins were missed, and the recycling was not collected.

"We received 65 complaints over a two day period because the truck couldn't get around very well, the weather affected the service.

"Also we have the new green box scheme which has been taken up by 4,000 people. A lot of people had teething problems with it, but these issues have now been dealt with."

"These figures have been influenced by the implementation of the green waste recycling and the bad weather, the figures are so high compared to the last quarter because of these two things."

For the full story see Friday's (June 26) Crawley Times.