by Paul O'Brien
Monday 02 March 2009
Douglas Sinclair the Chairperson of Consumer Focus Scotland is guest speaker at a function I attended tonight.
APSE's Citizen Engagement, Governance and Service Delivery, Strategic Forum, takes place in Motherwell Civic Centre. The Strategic Forums are a great opportunity to discuss a highly topical issue with a small group of senior elected members and officers from the world of local government. This type of focused debate helps inform the policy development process of APSE.
Douglas outlines the work of the new coordinated organisation that has taken over from previously separate consumer interest bodies. His talk sparks a healthy discussion about how citizens access public services generally and local authority services in particular.
A main strand of thinking is around how increasingly difficult it can be for the technologically excluded to gain access to the services they need. Douglas cites a statistic about 40% of consumers in Scotland not having access to computers and this sets me thinking that there are swathes of the population that are forgotten when we drive forwards on the egovernment agenda. Very often these can be the very people who need access to services the most. Call centres were also a bugbear for those present and it was identified how difficult and confusing these generally are for most people and therefore how difficult they must be for some of our more senior citizens. The answer of course is to have multiple methods of access but sometimes this can be overlooked when the pressures of the efficiency agenda are applied.
One final area of discussion was around the ongoing move towards converging rents between council and housing association tenants. Is it most beneficial for consumers for council rents to be uplifted to the same level as housing associations? To me this appears to be producer driven, so much then for RSLs being more accountable and giving greater levels of participation to tenants.
