Highland Council was yesterday flooded with phone calls from residents unable to pay their controversial new brown bin collection charges.
Many customers experienced problems with the automated message system to arrange the £30 annual payment to receive the fortnightly garden waste service.
Brown bin collections operate from the beginning of March to the end of November each year but the deadline for paying the charge is Sunday.
In a special council meeting in February, the council agreed to introduce the new charge to help plug a £20million funding gap, and generate £660,000 of new income while avoiding cutting the service and 25 jobs.
But yesterday 82-year-old Wilma Taylor, of Moray Park in Culloden, said she was “annoyed” after trying the phone number several times without success since last Thursday.
She said that she was greeted with an automated welcome message first in Gaelic, then English and a short message only advising her to have a credit or debit card ready for the uplifting of other types of rubbish.
After becoming fed-up, she later tried contacting the headquarters in Inverness but was unable to speak to an operator.
She added: “All the people I know who have been trying to ring have not got through. I’ve got a friend who has a very big garden and need their garden waste collected.
“I think if they are setting this up they ought to have it set up properly. If they want us to pay it they should have a fool proof system in place.”
Yesterday a local authority spokeswoman said that, despite recruiting extra temporary staff to deal with the anticipated higher call numbers for the garden waste payments, the number of calls was “much higher than expected”.
The spokeswoman added: “Unfortunately we had a technical problem with our online forms last Tuesday and a further problem with our secure payment service last Thursday, which meant we were unable to accept credit or debit card payments which affected our ability to answer customer inquiries and requests for some council services, including charging for brown bins.”
The spokeswoman added that the automated options on the 01349 886603 number have been updated to reflect information on garden waste collection. Customers can also pay online at www.highland.gov.uk/gardenwaste
She said that they had received a “small number of complaints” from customers unable to get through which have been resolved, including calling back customers and apologising for the difficulties they have experienced.
Another Inverness resident who wanted to raise a separate issue with the council yesterday said he tried calling 17 times in the space of a few hours but that, each time, the line was busy.