Complaints made to East Renfrewshire Council have more than doubled when compared to last year — but staff urge “caution” over the figures.
In total, the council received 1,027 complaints in the first half of 2021 to 2022, an increase of 529 from the same period in 2020 to 2021.
It also missed a five-day target to respond to frontline complaints, with an average time of 6.2 days.
However, a council officer told a cabinet meeting last week that complaints had been “greatly reduced” last year due to the pandemic and the average over four years is 719 complaints.
He admitted there had still been a “significant increase” on the average, but added that might be due to changes to how complaints are recorded.
Council leader Tony Buchanan said there had been a “significant increase” but there had been a lot of changes to services during the pandemic.
He said the “supportive role” council staff had played during the pandemic, including delivering medicines and meals and helping with the vaccine roll-out, meant that “some other tasks perhaps weren’t tended to as much as they should have been”.
The council leader added he expected that to change “as more and more staff return to the jobs they were doing.”
A council report said an increase in complaints was expected “given last year’s figures were lower as a result of the pandemic along with improved customer access to a new real time complaint system.”
While the council missed its five-day target for dealing with frontline complaints, it did hit the 20-day target for responding to stage two and escalated complaints, which include complex issues or where the customer remains unhappy after stage one. There was an average response time of 19.5 days for these complaints.
The most complaints, 66 per cent of the total, were received by the environment department. The report states the process to award garden waste permits has been improved following a number of complaints due to delays.
An online form to request bulky uplifts has also been amended to “improve the user’s experience.”
A council officer said: “It’s worth bearing in mind that one of the key factors we think might be behind that increase is a change in the business processes around how complaints are being captured and reported.
“There has been the introduction of a new system which has resulted in more complaints being logged. That is in part due to staff training and staff awareness being considerably increased.
“One of those business processes relates to the way the timescale of complaints being closed off is dealt with. The system has a real time component to it that only accounts for when the staff close it on the system.
“So if a staff member deals with a complaint but then doesn’t close it immediately on the system, there is a risk that the complaint will appear to have taken longer to resolve than it did.”
