Council in Brighton fully re-opening phone lines for housing services

Brighton and Hove City Council said many of its services have been affected by the Covid pandemic over the past two years.

It partially reopened phone lines for customer calls in September last year.

From June 29, it will be reintroducing full opening hours for the housing customer service phone line.

Full opening hours will return from June 29

A spokesman said: “From September 2021, as we emerged from the initial Covid-19 response, we opened all our phone lines for customer calls from 9.30am to 1.30pm Monday to Friday.

"We’re happy to confirm we’ll be reintroducing the full opening hours of the housing customer service phone line from 29 June.

“Covid has had a particular impact on our council housing repairs service where we’ve had to follow national social distancing guidance on accessing people’s homes and focused on urgent and emergency repairs.

“Since returning to a more usual working environment, our priority is to catch up all outstanding jobs. We’ve also now restarted our programme investing in improving people’s homes, including fitting solar panels which will help residents reduce their bills in the face of the cost of living crisis.

“We’d like to thank residents for their patience and understanding while we get all our services back on track.”

The council has previously had trouble with managing demand for people trying to pay their council tax by phone. It apologised for this in June 2021.

In March 2020, The Argus reported that just 57 per cent of phone calls for housing repairs were being answered due to a shortage of staff to answer calls.

Some 15,500 calls out of just over 27,000 were answered between October and December 2019.

Satisfaction among tenants has fallen overall in the last two years, according to a survey commissioned by the council.

Each category, such as overall quality and value for money, was above the minimum benchmark but four of the nine categories showed a decline in satisfaction. None of the categories saw any improvement in satisfaction since 2019.