This Guide from the Improvement and Development Agency looks at the fundamentals of customer service. It explores the options for customers to contact a council from enquiries being dealt with by someone responsible for a service, to the use of a single point of access to all services, through to joint enquiry centres dealing with calls about district and county council issues. It also deals with the various methods of measuring customer satisfaction. There is a warning that sample surveys and questionnaires can be unrepresentative because they will include some people who do not use services.The Guide concludes with a look local government culture. It stresses that thinking of the people councils serve as residents or council tax payers is not helpful in raising standards of service. Council officers working on the front-line need to think of the people they deal with as customers. Although people who use council services cannot walk away and take their business elsewhere, they need to be treated as if they can do so.
England’s Regional Development Agencies are not getting through well to local business and when they do get through they are failing to impress. This is the result of a poll by NOP of 500 members of the Institute of Directors. Launched in 1999 Regional Development Agencies were created in the English regions. Their mission is to transform the regions through sustainable economic development. Their role as strategic leaders is to influence and mobilise the efforts of regional partners across the public, private, community and voluntary sectors.The level of understanding of RDAs’ functions amongst the directors participating in the survey was generally low. Less than one third of members said that they understood the role and activities of the RDA in their region ‘quite well’ or ‘very well’. Only 17% of the directors surveyed had contacted their RDA over the course of the previous year for information or advice on business issues. The members surveyed were unimpressed with the Agencies’ awareness of the needs of businesses. Only 8% of those who had heard of their RDA agreed that it understood the needs of their organisation. A substantial body of directors feel that the Agencies lack both a prominent profile in their regions and
empathy with the needs of business.
Projects from six local authorities will share 130 million pounds of funding which will go towards the cost of library and sport facilities under the Private Finance Initiative. Bristol, Worcestershire, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Wigan councils now have to drawn up outline business cases to qualify for their share of the money.The six were chosen from projects submitted by 32 local authorities in England that were assessed by experts from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Sport England and the 4Ps – Public, Private Partnerships Programme – to establish their value and sustainability.
Read more on SIX LIBRARY AND SPORT PROJECTS CHOSEN FOR CHANCE OF FUNDING…