A disabled grandmother has been told to take her wheelie bin on a 400-yard trek if she wants it emptied.

Carol Vye, who was born with one leg and uses a stick, will have to drag the plastic wheelie bin from a bin store in the block of flats where she lives.

Then she must get it down a step, wheel it round the corner, down a hill and across the road to where dustmen will collect it.

Mrs Vye, 53, who lives in Locks Crescent, Portslade, said bins had been collected from the purpose-built bin store for the last 43 years.

Now she has been told she must wheel it round to Windlesham Close.

Mrs Vye's husband John, who is her carer, cannot carry the bin because he recently had a major heart attack.

Mrs Vye, who has lived in the flats for 12 years, said the refuse in the bin store had not been collected for three weeks.

It was supposed to be taken last Monday but Cityclean, Brighton and Hove City Council's in-house refuse team, failed to pick it up.

She said: "They have just decided they won't take our rubbish. They want us to take it quite a way away to be collected. I have phoned them but all you get is glib replies and I'm fed up with it. We pay council tax but they want us to do half their job for them."

A council spokesman said: "There was a problem with flytipping in the Windlesham Court bin store so we asked residents to put their bins outside the store instead. It seems Mrs Vye was not given the correct information as to where to store her bin. We have been in touch with her to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.

"We also informed her somebody from Cityclean will visit her in the next few days to sort out the problem."