A NEWPORT couple have been given three-year anti-social behaviour orders after neighbours reported them to authorities 39 times in five years.

Neighbours of Sally-Anne and Timothy Meredith, both 50, of Bridling Crescent, said they had been taking photos of them and visitors to their home because of a parking dispute.

And neighbours complained the couple also piled rubbish on their own driveway and allowed a rotten smell to fester.

Gwent Police’s PC Simon Richens, who attended the court hearing along with a Newport City Council representative, said two sets of neighbours had complained over the Merediths from 2009, when they lived at their former home on the Celtic Horizons estate in Duffryn.

The couple were offered an ‘acceptable behaviour contract’ in February this year in an attempt to stem their behaviour but it was ignored and they continued in their ways, he said.

Complaints started to be made against the couple at their former address from September 2009 to May 2012 and started again when they moved onto the new Glan Llyn housing estate in August last year.

The couple is now unable to approach their neighbours unless they arrange it with authorities, park on their neighbours’ kerb in Bridling Crescent or record their neighbours unless it is inadvertent.

Deputy District Judge Gosling told the couple at Newport Magistrates’ Court: “What I have looked at is frankly pathetic – something like 16-year-olds. The behaviour was anti-social.”

But he said the Asbos, which came into immediate effect when it was imposed on Friday afternoon, could be reviewed if they could come to an arrangement and “suddenly decide you can grow up” with their current neighbours.