Thursday, November 12th, 2026, 4:45 am
Manchester City Council Report Card – Part 11 – Almost an Hour Waiting in Line (on the Phone) and Big Phone Bills Just to Speak to a Person
Filed under: Does the Mayor recognise this issue?
day ago I published two posts about Manchester City Council. Part 10 explained that making complaints is very difficult (by design), they just want to get paid (citizens putting money in their bank) and give almost nothing in return, except maybe a site that does not work, a phone line where you talk to bots (hard to get through to an actual person), and so on.
Part 11 deals with calls. So my wife and I rang the line, for the fifth time. This time, at long last, it was finally possible to merely get on the queue to speak to an advisor. We were placed at #19 in the queue. It’s a long queue, but how many people deal with this queue?
We were stuck at #11 (in the queue) after 20 minutes on the line. It would take almost half an hour to get to #10, so we assume that waiting for an hour or nearly an hour is considered normal.
This was not a busy day. This wasn’t rush hour.
We still remember how, back in 2011, I was able to do all this in person. This time it was supposed to be a lot more trivial. They already had all the details, we just needed to change/update some details (like address or account).
If people phone up, it might end up costing them about 10 pounds just to be #10 in the queue. That’s appalling.
What’s worse is, while placing the call we were facing a desk with 2-3 staff doing nothing. What a terrible waste of labour.
Are we paying for them to chat about their physiotherapist? (Which is what they did)
It seems like a misapplication of duty, a misallocation of money/resources too.
I’ll say more about this tomorrow.
