My Visit to City Of York Council's New Customer Service Centre

City of York Council's new HQ

Oh dear, where to begin? I have just had to endure the torture of City of York Council's new and improved Customer Service Centre and I cannot believe how shockingly badly designed it is. 

First off, let's remember that, according to S Harrison (the company that re-designed the place) The new building cost £32 MILLION to design and re-build (opens in new window). That's £32 MILLION of Tax payers money. As can be seen from that link, a lot of thought went into the design and sustainability of the building (apparently). However, no-one seems to have put thought into how the building was meant to be USED by COUNCIL TAX PAYERS. 

Here's an over-head shot of the new building from the link above:

Finding the Entrance

So to start off with, they've placed the entertance to the building (for customers) all the way around the far side (if you're coming from town, which many people I saw where). However, it's not immediately obvious where it is. 

To combat this, City of York Council (CYC) have sellotaped A4 laminated signs to the windows pointing around the corner. A4! That's great to see when you're up close to the building but when you stand on the street corner as I did, trying to suss the place out, they're almost invisible and I don't think it's my eyesight.

Following the laminated window-signs you eventually reach a set of double doors (this is a HUGE building)  "Great" you think "I've found the entrance". WRONG! That's the staff entrance. For customers you need to keep going all the way around the far side, almost hidden round the 'back' of the building. 

As I was entering, I passed a couple of elderly people who had to stop for a breather as walking all the way round had tired them out. Bearing in mind that the new offices aren't ideally situated for anyone (as they're in town, not near residential areas) and that a large number of people who need to use a face-to-face service (as opposed to telephone or internet) are likely to be elderly and I can see already that there's a problem.

I should've known that this wasn't going to be a good visit when I reached the snazzy, glass automatic doors to find a HUGE mess of bird-shit on the floor just in front of them. It seems that CYC has skimped on the bird detterent measures on the building (or maybe weren't allowed them as the building is listed) with the result that the first thing you see as you FINALLY enter the building, is a pile of shit. An omen if ever there was one.

The Experience

Upon entering the building I was greeted by a polite gentleman in a smart black suit who asked me what I was visiting for. "Renewing my parking permit" was my response. He wandered over to a snazzy looking touch-screen panel, whizzed through a few taps and a ticket came out. He handed it to me and advised me to wait in the far corner until my number was called.

I checked my ticket.

I was number 3234.

Oh dear lord, I hope they're not going sequentially.

I wandered through into the vast open-plan expanse that is the City of York Council customer service centre. 

Arrange this more haphazardly, remove SOME walls and add some comfy
seating  in designated waiting areas and BINGO. CYC's new Customer
Service Centre.

The vast area is out-lined with private rooms around the outside edge. Each room is given a letter. I'm assuming these are private rooms as the rest of the place isn't very private at all. Splitting up the room, in a seemingly random design are desks at which the Customer Service Operatives sit. These are all numbered (1 -> 18 as far as I could tell). The desks are sparten (monitor, phone and minimal clutter) giving a slightly clinical feel to the proceedings. 

Breaking up the random collection of desks are seating areas for customers. These are a collection of blue, comfortable seats arranged in a rectangle shape. These are positioned near pillars. Positioned high-up on these pillars are SCREENS OF POWER. These screens display ads for City of York Council services, alongside the numbers that the speakers call out and the desks you're meant to go to to be served.

Kind of like an upmarket "Till 5 please" announcement from the Post Office.

This is where the despair set in. 

As I entered the room at 11:35 everyone in the waiting area had a sullen, miserable look about them. Shortly after I entered, 2 ladies stormed out in a huff. AS they left I overheard one of the ladies saying to the other "...we could be waiting all bloody day in here".

I checked my ticket again, 3234.

The screen called numbers out at random "Number 55 please go to desk 10"; "Number 1032 please go to desk 1". Leaving me initially with no way of knowing when in all smeg my number would be called as there seemed to be no sequence to the system.

Also annoying (from a customer experience point of view) was that there seemed to be many York Council Employees (juding from their lanyards) walking about "ready to help" but not actually helping many people. 

Oh, and it should surprise no-one to learn that there weren't enough seats for people to use whilst waiting for their seemingly randomly generated number to be called by the great screens in the sky, so many people were milling about, or leaning on the walls of the 4 "Customer Access" terminal cubicles (Screens, keyboard and mouse with Internet Explorer opened at York.Gov.UK).

After waiting for half-an-hour without my number being called, I fell into conversation with a pleasant gentleman called Geoffry (sic). Geoffry was also bemused by this whole system and we lamented together over the previous system:

"When the parking services where at 9 St Leonards Place you could walk in, there were two people behind the desk and you'd have your issue sorted and be out within 5 minutes." 

I had to agree, that was true. 

I entered my 40th minute of waiting, which made Geoffry's previous comment seem even more apt.

Through team-work with Geoffry we eventually worked out how the numbering system operated and from that were better able to estimate how long we'd be waiting.

After my 47th minute of waiting in this £32 MILLION shiny headquarters I was called across to desk 8 which was staffed by a very pleasent gentlemen who seemed resigned to his fate who greeted me with a resigned "Sorry for your wait."

He informed me that he wasn't even meant to be working the desks today, that he should've been transferred to the telephone helpline side of things but, due to circumstances outside of his control, he was confined to his desk running the Parking Permits side of things. A desk where, incidentally, there should've been two people working but "I'm afraid it's only me today."

He served me as efficiently as he could but he was thawted at the final step, the printers that the IT people had arranged, were communal. Which meant that as each staff member wanted to print something, they could concievably be delayed by the person in front of them. Also, he informed me, "the parking permits haven't been printing properly all day". 

I felt like Kafka was watching me from above and laughing. 

He headed to the printer with the blank sheet of paper with the parking permit marked out at the bottom, all ready to print out my permit. 

Alas, he was indeed thawted by a lady who had sent something to print ahead of him and informed him that she'd be a "little while".

He headed back to my table: "Why don't I process your payment whilst we're waiting for the printer?"

I assured him that that was fine by me. At this stage, after nearly an hour of waiting, I was laughing at the whole experience more than angry. 

He was able to get to the printer, pulled all the trays out and eventually made it work. He came back with my permit: 

"Sorry, it's not printed correctly again. At this stage you can take this away, it's still valid as long as you cut the permit out carefully. Or you can leave it with me and when we get this issue fixed, I'll post you a new one."

I sympathised with him and took my existing permit away. After all, according to the time on my payment receipt, I'd waited 57 minutes to get it.

I thanked the gentleman and left, passing Geoffry on the way. He congratulated me for getting served and wondered when his number would come up. "It's worse than the lottery" he suggested. I agreed.

As of now it's 15:14 in the afternoon. I don't know if Geoffry is still waiting, I hope not (but wouldn't be surprised) however I know a great many are. 

TL;DR

City of York Council has spent over £32 MILLION of Taxpayers money to move everything into this central, specially designed office space.

In doing so they're made it so that a simple activity (handing over a form with payment and getting a printed letter and permit back) has gone from being a 2 minute job to a 57 minute job.

They've created a waiting system that gives people NO indication of when they might be served, there aren't enough staff to serve all who need to be served quickly enough and there aren't enough seats to seat everyone who might be waiting. 

Everyone who was waiting had a downtrodden, dispirited look on their faces as their problems and issues had been converted to random numbers to be shouted out by a faceless screen in the sky. 

I cannot concieve of who thought this was a good idea and would work smoothly. 

I cannot understand how £32 MILLION has been spent and things have gotten WORSE.

Bravo City Of York council. 

Bravo.

Oh how we love the rich and corrupt:

Subittled: Hurry up and retire Dave Hartnett you corrupt waste of space.

From The Guardian:

"Audit office attacks tax deals for corporations

National Audit Office finds tax officials failed to seek proper legal advice while negotiating settlements with large companies.

The National Audit Office has found that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) did not seek proper legal advice, involve its own specialists or even take notes whilst negotiating settlements with large companies..."

Continued on http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/14/hmrc-tax-collection-failures-nao.

Now, Private Eye magazine has been following this story for MONTHS and reporting on it in nearly every issue so National Audit Office's findings come as no surprise to me. What does surprise me though is the next sentence in the piece:

"But despite these failings uncovered by the former High Court tax judge Sir Andrew Park, the NAO has concluded that five negotiated settlements which were the subject of the report were "reasonable" and fair to the public purse."

This comes across as a government department (the NAO) which has uncovered MILLIONS of pounds missing from the public purse (as companies were told they didn't have to pay it) trying to save face and avoid more embarrasment and shame. "Oh, but it's ok, the deals were 'reasonable'." Reasonable my foot, a later paragraph in the Guardian story reads:

"The report's findings may concern many ordinary taxpayers. Last year, it was alleged that companies such as Vodafone were not required to pay tax bills of up to £7bn following negotiations with Revenue and Customs while others such as Goldman Sachs have been let off up to £20m."

How on EARTH is any of that "reasonable and fair the public purse"? Even if the figures are out and Vodafone dodged only 4 billion, how is that reasonable??

Private Eye and the NAO have both pointed out that many of these important meetings, involving the taxes you and I slave away for, took place informally and no notes were kept. This was not an oversight. No notes were taken so that when the shit hit thte fan (as they probably guessed it would) nobody could get in trouble as there wouldn't be a paper-trail to follow. No paper-trail and, as we're seeing at the Leveson Enquiry, officials can lie all they like as they know we can't find the paper-trail as it's non-existent.

Dave Hartnett knew exactly what he was doing when he negotiated deals with Goldman Sachs and Vodafone in expensive restraunts in London (probably at meals paid for by Vodafone et al). Every step along the way he's been dodging and evading answering questions and it's shocking that the most senior tax collector in HMRC was able to act this way.

Incedentally, I just googled Dave Hartnetts name and the following story was top of Google's list:

Paying cash in hand is 'diddling the country', says HMRC's Dave Hartnett

People who pay cash in hand to tradesmen are “diddling” the economy and diverting money from hospitals and schools, the country’s most senior taxman, Dave Hartnett, has warned.

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9043087/Paying-cash-in-hand-is-diddling-the-country-says-HMRCs-Dave-Hartnett.html (Jan 2012)

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Hartnett says that householders have a duty to ensure that other people do not evade paying their share of tax...

Oh the irony, it burns, it burns!!

Apparently Mr Hartnett is retiring this summer. Not a day too damn soon.

Sid Meir's Civilisation

It's awesome having my blog 'back' again, as it allows me to focus on things that I want to focus on which just won't fit in a Facebook post. AS you can see from my previous recent posts, these are computer-games based at the moment. I make no apologies for that, I'm obviously going though a computer game phase at the moment and therefore that's what my blog is expressing! I'm sure in 6 months or so I'll be wiritng about something different but for now, computer games it is.

I've already mentioned Under A Killing Moon as a computer game that captured my imagination many years ago, and I'm SO glad that the team have reunited to bring us Project Fedora. However, before there was Under A Killing Moon, for me, there was the one, the only, Civilisation:


(image from Moby Games).

For those not in the know, Civilization is a computer-strategy game where you start off with a single settler unit and from there spawn cities, grow a civilization and try to survive through the centuries. If you're good you can even win the game by winning the space-race or destroying the other civilizations in the game.


(image from Moby Games).

The above shows a typical Civ 1 map screen. You can see the city of Leipzig, a fairly new city (hence the 1 denoting its size); there are also some units on the right of the screen and menu across the top for various controls.

I can't even remember when I started playing Civilization. I do remember that I was a child and I'm fairly certain I was in primary school so I must have been perhaps 10 or so? However old I was, I remember it took me a LONG time to grasp the game. Which wasn't too much of a problem as the game actually came with a manual that, to my memory was hundereds of pages long. I remember trying to plough through that thing to better understand the game and make my civilizations better.

The idea of controlling everything about your Civilization from roads to research and war really captured my imagination in a way that only Civ 2 ever did. I remember spending many a summer day with a friend of mine playing Civ 1 and Civ 2 trying to survive against the Romans, Greeks and Mongols. Such GOOD memories that only an open game such as Civilization could inspire.

To the best of my knowledge, I never WON a game of Civilization. I never won the space race, I never ruled the world or such like. That does not mean I did not have fun, far from it! Every game was different, every game was a new challange and I played game after game and loved each one.

So what inspired this post? It was this Reddit update by user Lycerius who states that: "I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows..."

This post is fascinating. It describes the state of the nation in Lycerius's game of Civ 2 that has been on-going for 10 years! He includes a screen grab link here http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs.

The fact that a game like this can be played for 10 years is mind-blowing in and amongst itself. What is also mind-blowing is the fact that Lycerius's post has attracted (at time of writing) 2919 comments. Each comment is suggesting different ideas of how Lycerius could continue the game and progress.

I never got very far with Civ 3 and only had a brief experience with Civ 5 a few weekends ago when it was on Free to Play thanks to STEAM. This post on http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html shows what I realised when I played this free trial, that the game has, in many ways been simplified and seems to have made some drastic mis-steps with regards to the actual design of the game.

I wonder if I can find my Civ 2 CD? See you in 10 years!!

If you've never played Civ then it seems that Civ 4 was a good update, though it created Multiplayer problems but was great at single-player by all accounts.

Brief Post: Public Service cuts: Passport control

Ok, so we all know that the Tory government in the UK is making some pretty savage cuts on the basis that "Labour left us in debt". Whilst that may have been the case when the coalition was formed, I don't think they can continue using that excuse.

Anyway, recent arguments on Radio 4 (amongst other places) have focussed on Passport control and how it's going to get swamped and not be able to cope at peak periods. Cue government ministers swooping in and saying "No, the system is built around flexibility and we can draft staff in from elsewhere to cope with demand. There is no problem." Otherwise known as the Ostritch argument.

You might well have believed that (if you were an idiot) and gone on with your life.

Except of course, the government was lying and, thanks to Twitter, we actually have photograph proof. Twitter user @Amandagore posted two updates which I'll reproduce for you below (because I'm awesome like that). Links are https://twitter.com/amandagore/status/212315087099269122 and https://twitter.com/amandagore/status/212319151027519488.





Yeah, everything's working just fine Tories, keep doing what you're doing. *Sigh*