8:00am Tuesday 16th March 2010
SIR – In local government we are always very tempted to look at the negatives.
An excellent example of this is performance management reporting by the city council and the criticism the Worcestershire Hub shared service has received recently.
It is very easy to highlight the negative points as they make good catchy headlines and sound bites and then ignore the positives.
In last Thursday’s paper it was reported that it is unlikely the staff in this service will cope with the level of queries resulting from the newly issued council tax bills. The article stated that extra resources in anticipation of this have been found but it did not clarify that it meant extra staff had been already brought in and were being trained which will help maintain performance. It should be noted that there is a team of dedicated staff at the Hub who are hard working and are always willing go that extra mile. These are times of unprecedented financial difficulty with many people having to contact the Hub for the first time with complex issues that take time to be sorted.
I would like to praise these staff for the fact that, as you said, across the service 80 per cent of all callers were dealt with within the required performance time set.
Councillor Lucy Hodgson
Portfolio for citizen engagement and communications
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