Friday, November 6th, 2026, 6:04 am
Manchester City Council Report Card – Part 2 – Four Weeks for Humans to Deal With Time-Critical Web Forms (or Requests Made Online)
Filed under: Way too slow, indicative of severe understaffing issues
s noted in the previous part, when dealing with Manchester City Council it seems like we deal with finger-pointers, who either point to “Web site” or point back at you.
When the stuff – not staff – they point at (e.g. Web site) isn’t working they don’t know what to say. They escalate and get more hostile if not combative – to the point of trying to escalate to “security” and intimidate so as to discourage criticism.
This has all the signs of a failing operation. It’s unwilling to hear or properly deal with problems.
When we went there yesterday we were prepared to present and deal with four problems.
The first concerned a payment. What we discovered was a bit shocking.
A guy called “Josh” (maybe not the same spelling) was there explaining to me that, contrary to what his colleagues said to me 2 weeks earlier, it can take four weeks to process webforms.
4 weeks!
Why not hire more people to deal with this?
Josh explained he knew this because he had worked in a relevant department before. He said there was no “Other Option” and when one decides to “set up” something online it can take almost a month for staff to get around to it. I explained to him that taking 4 weeks to process a request is far too low, more so when there is some urgency involved. I told him that even 2 weeks would be too much and 2 weeks already passed, so we were justifiably impatient. When a Town Hall or local council, for example, takes monthly payments and suppose some address or bank account change/s, it’s unreasonable to take 4 weeks to process the update. It would cause issues, inevitably.
Payments are needed for Town Hall to run. It’s what pays the salaries of the employees we saw there. I sometimes try to very politely get this point across (withoutn seeming rude or confrontational). If they suck at collecting money, how much worse would they be at things they do not financially benefit from?
We’ll revisit the point at a later part as someone in a different department confirmed this delay to me. He said 3 weeks, not 4 weeks.
It’s still way too long.
