Bin and gone: after wasting millions on avoiding contact with the public, the council is finally adjusting its reporting system
Croydon Council has admitted that it has been running a sub-standard public contact service for years.
The council has announced that it is abandoning the requirement for residents to sign-up for its deeply flawed My Account system, which until this month it insisted that members of the public must use to report any missed bin collections by Veolia.
What the council itself describes as a “simple task” will now be possible in one area of the council’s clunky website.
The council has wasted millions of pounds in its efforts to keep residents at arm’s length and avoid any direct contact with Council Tax-payers by moving their reporting function online, using My Account and the expensive and needlessly commissioned Croydon CrapApp, which has never had a reporting category for missed bin collections (handy for contractors Veolia when it comes to manipulating their performances stats).
This was all done mainly in the drive for “efficiency”, to reduce the number of staff working on the council’s phone lines and save a few bob.
The latest changes, announced last week, were put in train well before the May local elections, although that has not stopped Jason Perry, Croydon’s part-time Mayor, from trying to claim credit for the upgrade.
Perry (catchphrase: “I’m listening”) has meanwhile done nothing to extend the operating hours of his own office – where the phones are answered just four hours of each working day – or to increase the operating hours and call centre operators of the council’s contact centre.
The council announcement said, “Online waste services such as checking bin collection days or reporting a missed collection, as well as other useful information, are now directly available in one place through the Croydon Council website.”
The council describes these as “improvements”.
They mean that “residents will no longer need to log in to My Account to complete these simple tasks”.
The council says that residents can now do the following all on the council website:
- check your bin collection days and download your bin collection calendar
- report missed bin collections
- report damaged or missing bins or request an additional recycling container/bin removal
- request assisted bin collections
Perhaps unusually for Croydon Council’s website, these services are clearly flagged up close to the top of the site’s main page and easy to navigate, with a clickable link taking site users to the area they require.
Scalding: don’t you dare try to report a missed collection if you’ve been found guilty of any of these heinous ‘crimes’ – all part of the effort to get residents to pre-sort waste before it heads to the Beddington incinerator
None of which, of course, attends to the issue of those people – often the least well-off, and many in the borough’s elderly groups – who don’t have easy access to laptops or tablets, smartphones or superfast broadband, and so have no means of accessing these services.
“The council’s contact centre remains available for residents who have difficulty accessing online services or who require further support,” the council says; the contact centre is closed all weekend, and has been operating reduced service hours for several years, even before covid.
My Account will continue to be used, the council says, to request or renew garden waste service – an area of contention from many who have been paying extra but not receiving the promised service – and to order or amend a bulky waste collection.
The council says that these services “will be moved to the main webpages later this summer, at which point residents will be able to request these services through the website and manage any changes through links in their confirmation emails”.
Rubbish: Mayor Jason Perry
And they say, “As part of its ongoing drive to improve customer service and ensure all residents are treated with respect, the council is also investing in upgrading its telephone systems and reviewing its online support, to make it quicker and easier for residents to get in touch.”
And as for the Tory Mayor: “It’s important that we make core council services accessible for our residents and I’m pleased that we have already seen an increase in residents taking advantage of these online services,” said Perry, who has done nothing to extend the hours of service of the council’s contact centre.
“I’m determined to keep improving our customer services,” he said.
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