Wednesday 23 September 2015

Barnet Council website now fixed & the Council thank The Barnet Eye!

Regular readers will have read how on Monday, The Barnet Eye identified problems with the Barnet Council website. It appears that the Council IT (Capita) supplier put changes to the website live without doing any testing to see whether they worked. As a result, people trying to organise charity events were unable to submit license applications. As these have to be in 2 weeks in advance, this potentially would have caused many problems and cost local charities thousands of pounds, as well as causing unpaid helpers endless hassle trying to work out what was going on.

The good news is that the Council have fixed the site and even thanked the Barnet Eye for bringing the matter to their attention.




Hi, sorry for the late reply. This should have been changed. Thanks for letting us know.

They even apologised for the poor service!
Which just goes to show that blogging and tweeting in Barnet does get results. I am a tad disappointed, if not unentirely surprised that the Leader and the Deputy Leader of the council
couldn't be bothered to at least put up a note apologising and saying they'd try and ensure better service in future. I can't see either of them emulating the great wartime US president Roosevelt who had a sign on his desk saying "The buck stops here". I suspect in Barnet, the buck always stops somewhere else. Sad really, a bit of manners from the pair of them in at least acknowledging the fact the organisation they run had problems, which inconvenienced the taxpayers who pay their allowances, would have been pleasant.

1 comment:

Mr Reasonable said...

Hi Rog, Sadly this is a very common problem. There are multiple broken links on the website, and I have referred many back to them. At the Performance and Contract monitoring meeting on 1 September I asked many questions about Capita's performance including the website. It may interest you to know that some of the worst performance was from RE and CSG pages. Below is an extract from the committee report.
"50% of surveys rated the website as poor. An analysis of ratings in June showed that 35% of the poor comments related to IT functionality, whilst 40% were linked to page content. Once the search function – a current significant source of customer frustration - is improved in August, we expect to see a much more significant improvement in satisfaction. All webpages are owned by a Delivery Unit, and some of the lowest ratings were received by RE (27%), CSG (33%) and Barnet Homes (37%)." The satisfaction target is 80%.
Capita are paid millions as the council's IT contractor yet the service is poor. Not good enough.