Tuesday, November 10th, 2026, 7:15 am
Manchester City Council Report Card – Part 8 – “Customers Services” is 4 Times More Than Needed, Far Bigger Than Required, Other Departments Criminally Understaffed
Filed under: The icing on the —-cake, a virtually empty hall staffed by about 5 times more workers than customers
day ago I published a part that said getting to “Customers Services” wasn’t easy (security tries to send people elsewhere) and getting to an actual person on the phoneline seems infeasible. If or when you finally get placed on a queue, then it’ll take forever. For instance, in our case it took almost an hour of waiting on a queue (not rush hour, not a busy time or day). There were 19 people “ahead” and the line (queue) moved at a pace suggestive of at most two people taking calls for the whole of Manchester. We’ll cover the evidence of this at a later point in a later part.
The worst part of it? This used to be done swiftly, in person.
None of that should be necessary. I should not have had to revisit “Customers Services”, the second time accompanied by my wife. I submitted a form right there on the spot (“Customers Services”) 2 weeks earlier and its competition was confirmed by staff at “Customers Services”. I showed them the screen and asked a couple of times if that will work. They said yes.
Afterwards I told them that I wanted to make a complaint about site compatibility and other issues that I had encountered. They could not find forms (papers) for complaints anymore. So “Customers Services” itself was surprised; it’s like they phased out complaints mechanisms.
Why? Who benefits?
As pointed out in previous parts, “Customers Services” staff kept point to the same useless options (that had not worked) while talking casually to one another. They weren’t busy. They were overstaffed there.
It’s like “Customers Services” became a gossip hub for its workers. I’ll give more examples later this week.
