Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
30,000 hrs on hold for one council
CALLERS spent 30,000 hours on hold while trying to speak to a council.
This amounts to roughly 1,250 days, 178 weeks, or three-and-a-half years.
High call volumes have arisen from major incidents including the Covid pandemic, storms and the cost of living crisis.
The huge wait on Newcastle City Council’s phone lines last year has been blamed on understaffing at the contact centre, managed by Your Homes Newcastle.
A YHN boss said that cutting the amount of time callers are spending on hold was the service’s “number one priority”.
Around 280,000 calls were placed to the contact centre in 21/22 – with an average waiting time of more than six minutes.