COUNCIL bosses are set to take further steps to make themselves more accessible to York residents.

Top City of York councillors will meet tomorrow to discuss a £2 million-plus expansion of the authority's easy@york scheme, which is aimed at improving customer access to council services.

The scheme involves making council services and departments more user-friendly and accessible.

A report to the council's urgency committee says the scheme's first phase, which has included making many council services available online, has been a "major success" and an "exemplar" of how improvements can be made.

Now the next phase is set to be launched, to improve user-friendliness in various other areas, including housing management; adult and children's social services; parking; electoral registration; and licensing.

The roll-out is essential ahead of the council's move to new headquarters at Hungate, as the plans for the new building are based upon more work being done electronically, thus taking up less real' space.

The matter is going to the council's urgency committee so it can be dealt with before the summer recess, thus avoiding delays to the Hungate relocation.

Four options have been drawn up, with the cheapest one - costing £2 million to £2.5 million - being proposed.

A report by easy@york programme director Tracey Carter said: "Customer expectations are changing and our customers are demanding more from all our services. Government strategy is evolving towards the delivery of end to end transformation of services centred around the customer. Technology is offering us increasing options to change the ways we work and the council is itself setting out its ambitions to embrace this agenda "The move to Hungate is dependent upon a second phase of easy@york. The design of Hungate is based around a one-stop shop where all customer contact will be centrally managed. Without easy@york this will be impossible and the Hungate building will not be able to function properly."

The report says further changes will lead to savings of £100,000 a year, and improvements to 1.65 million customer transactions.

The report also says that the first phase has so far brought the council savings of £307,000. It said a customer satisfaction survey of 504 people last month had found 99 per cent were very or fairly satisfied with the overall service of the York Customer Centre, 100 per cent were satisfied with the person taking their call, and 92 per cent were satisfied with the speed at which the call was answered.

A website survey found 69 per cent of users were satisfied with the site; 76 per cent found the e-forms easy to use; and 90 per cent were likely to use the site again.

9:19am Thursday 2nd August 2007

By Gavin Aitchison

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