Never mind my bins, who’s that Bond baddie?

Bizarre phone calls made to councils

STUCK on the crossword? Lost your favourite recipe from the Great British Bake Off? Worried about cooking your noodles?

Perhaps there’s something strange in your neighbourhood? Who you gonna call?

Apparently, a large number of people think that the answer to that question is the council.

The Local Government Association (LGA) has now revealed some of the bizarre and often hilarious queries taken by the customer service hubs, which handle more than 50million calls each year.

While most of those fielded are about council tax, parking and bins, the LGA – which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales – said some of the inquiries have left staff scratching their heads.

They included an elderly woman in Staffordshire clearly shaken and stirred by a James Bond crossword clue, a Somerset television viewer in urgent need of a strawberry tart tin size and someone from the same county baffled by what to do having eaten an out-of-date pork pie.

Nottinghamshire County Council was offered a cat by a caller who claimed that it was a nuisance, while another was desperately seeking to rekindle a holiday romance.

Peter Fleming, the deputy chairman of the LGA, said: ‘These light-hearted examples of calls highlight the variety of issues that councils deal with every day – from the slightly amusing to the outright bizarre.

‘Even if they do feel as though they are outside their remit, council call centre staff will always try their hardest to assist where they can. But whilst councils offer more than 800 services, some requests are simply beyond them.’

He did not say whether the Staffordshire centre was good at crosswords. In case the caller is still puzzled, the answer is Blofeld.