Controversial litter enforcement firm Kingdom Services was the subject of the bulk of complaints last year to Conwy Council.

Members of the council’s finance scrutiny committee were told by head of regulatory and housing services, Peter Brown, the unpopular firm which pulled out of the county last summer was the main cause of public concern during the 2017/18 financial year.

Over the last two years complaints to the authority went up by a staggering 69.57 per cent.

Presenting a report on the number of complaints and compliments received by the council last year Mr Brown said: “This year as usual compliments outweigh complaints on the other hand there has been an increase in the number of complaints.

"There are reasons for this and we would would expect next year things to get back on an even keel. This period has coincided with the Kingdom issues and over that period we saw a huge increase in the number of complaints around that issue.”

Kingdom had been an ongoing issue in the county before they opted to leave late last year.

They had received heavy criticism from groups within the county, including Facebook page North Wales against Kingdom Security who amassed more than 100,000 followers by the end of 2018.

Their tactics had been described as “threatening” and “a form of bullying” by former Llandudno mayor Carol Marubbi who held a number of protests against the enforcement company in 2017.

Kingdom spoke to the Pioneer last year and said the company was only operating according to the direction of the county councils.

Kingdom were not the only issue council received complaints from with planning matter also receiving a large number.

Mr Brown said: “Planning decisions have been a source of continuing complaint. And we have looked at changing the complaint policy to deal with that because quite a lot of the time the complaint is about the decision and there is little we can do to resolve that. So by changing the policy we will be able to deal with those queries.”

From April 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, the council logged 463 compliments and 350 complaints.

The department getting the most complaints was Environment, Roads and Facilities (ERF) which is responsible for litter enforcement as well as highways.

The ERF department received just over half of all complaints to Conwy Council with 157 incidents logged for that section last year.