People ringing Leeds City Council for help can expect to wait more than 10 minutes before call is even answered, new figures reveal

During 2021, the authority’s customer contact centre received 1.4 million calls from customers – an increase of 29,000 phone calls on the previous year.

A report which went before Leeds City Council’s strategy scrutiny board this week showed the average answer time for “medium priority” calls was around 751 seconds – more than 12 and a half minutes.

According to council officers, more call centre staff are now being employed, while better use of technology is being looked at to ensure people wouldn’t need to use the phone service so often. It is hoped this will help halve waiting times.

But some have criticised the council’s plans saying they are not ambitious enough, with one councillor claiming the authority should be aiming to answer most calls within 20 seconds.

Leeds City Council’s director of resources Neil Evans told the meeting that response times had increased, adding: “It’s fairly obvious from the overall performance that we are not where we want to be. This is not an acceptable position for us – today is not about trying to defend the position but to talk about what we are going to do to improve.”

He added more resources were being put into running council contact centres, and that the public needed other ways of accessing council services.

As part of these plans, the council says it has already recruited nine more call centre staff since the start of 2022, and plans to bring in a further 18 by June. It is hoped this will halve response times.

He added other methods such as “e-forms” and “chatbot technology” could be used to make it easier for the council to respond to problems.

According to statistics released by the council, around 257,000 of the telephone calls made to the council in 2021 were related to council tax queries, with more than 500,000 about housing and 68,000 on bin collections.

Coun Sam Firth (Con) said: “There are people waiting on the phone lines for far longer than 10 minutes, if we get an average of 10 minutes.

“I think this report isn’t ambitious enough to say we are going to halve it to five minutes. Of the historic metric of 80/20, with 80 per cent of calls answered within 20 seconds, my personal view is that there needs to be more looked into in making sure we can improve this.”

Mr Evans responded: “I didn’t suggest five minutes and two minutes was an endpoint, but it’s important we set a target for improvement right now.

“That would bring us to a pre-pandemic position. What I don’t think is a plausible position is that if we haven’t seen the process improvements I’ve talked about, that the authority has unlimited resources to increase the number of people we have.

“If we don’t reduce the calls, there is a limit as to how many extra staff council have.”

Leeds City Council deputy leader Debra Coupar (Lab) said: “We are trying to be realistic. We could have brought a report which said we could get to two minutes in a certain amount of time, but we have to be transparent in what we can achieve.

“We can’t resolve it all in a couple of months but there are steps we can take. Mostly people would like to engage with us in a digital way, and most people want to do that. The only time I revert to the telephone is if I’m that frustrated with the digital approach I’ve tried that I take to the phone.”

Coun Firth said: “We are in a situation where 30,000 more calls have been made in the past year, even more than the first year of the pandemic, and the situation has changed, more people are having to call up.”

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