Friday, November 13th, 2026, 4:20 am
Manchester City Council Report Card – Part 12 – Empty Buildings, Not Much Getting Done
Filed under: Lots of room, but hardly any people
lot of businesses do it, so the public services do too. Like banks, with endless closures, it seems like the Town Hall decided that people should just play with “apps” and sites, then it can justify, based on that… that it is OK to eliminate services.
There is no “demand” for them… as people get no service even when they come there in person. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it?
Give rubbish service or no service, then say people don’t show up anymore.
A devil’s advocate might say that Town Hall got bad because of the renovations taking place. But no, it is definitely not because of the new building (that the services got so much worse). Almost no people show up because they are pushing people online, expecting them to even go online when they already show up in person.
Even the security staff, as noted before, tries to divert “customers” away.
Worse yet, “online” there is no browser support, they don’t check forms (submitted online), and if people phone up it seems like there’s only one person dealing with calls regarding particular issues. One person for the whole city!
The ladies at the desk said “more than one”, so I responded with “maybe two”. I wrote this down. So I remember.
I’ll explain why we arrived at this estimate.
It seems like the ladies know the team taking the calls. They know some of them in person, but it’s certainly understaffed based on 5 calls that I made in a 2-week period. I’ll share some data about this in the coming days.
