Oxfordshire County Council 'not answering calls quickly enough'

Almost a quarter of people waiting for their calls to be answered by a council ended up giving up, a cabinet meeting heard.

Oxfordshire County Council's target is to answer 90% or more of its calls.

However, in September 24% of its 14,274 calls were not answered in time.

Glynnis Phillips, cabinet member for corporate services, apologised to "every caller who abandoned their call because we didn't answer quickly enough". 

A report said the volume of calls went up by 11% but the workforce was about 30% below full staffing levels because the council had "difficulty attracting suitable candidates", according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The report said a "redesign" of its teams would mean it would not have to redirect resources from the phones when other time-sensitive work needed doing.

Social care was where the "highest abandonments are due to limited resources", it added.

Ms Phillips said: "This is our front door, the gateway to council services, and we are dealing with approaching 30,000 customer contacts each month, ranging from phone calls, to emails, to application forms and social media inquiries."

She said the increase in abandoned calls was "due to an unexpected level of staff turnover across the different teams in the customer service centre".

"This is not unusual for customer services but what has affected this target has been the speed of turnover and the level of experience that has moved on," she added.

Fourteen members of staff left in July for reasons including maternity leave and to move to different departments.

"A number of these colleagues had four years or more of experience within customer service," Ms Phillips explained, adding: "This level of loss is not easily replaced."

She said the council was "actively recruiting" new staff and that the figures for October already showed improvement.

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