Sloppy LibDems fail to spot Council's phoney figures

Local Conservatives today accused Haringey Council of publishing 'phoney figures' on its telephone answering performance.

According to the Tories, the Council's data are deliberately 'massaged' to improve performance data on an area of customer service which even the Council admits is poor. Conservatives say that this is tantamount to fiddling the figures.

According to Conservatives, a paper to the Council's ruling Executive on 10 June 2003 showed an appalling level of prompt telephone call answering in general with, in particular, as many as 50% of calls to Housing Services regularly going unanswered or reaching the busy signal.

Conservatives observe that the numbers reported to the Executive were simply regurgitated by the Lib-Dem 'official opposition' in their press release (11 June 2003) but that their PR overlooked a fundamental flaw in the Council's data collection methodology.

According to the Council's own papers a call is regarded as answered, inter-alia, if: a) it is diverted to voicemail b) it is diverted to a mobile phone. NB. Tories say that many calls diverted to Officers' mobile phones are also then diverted to voicemail.

Conservatives say that including such calls in "calls answered" data is a nonsense. The essence of calls answered data is to measure a Council's performance in helping callers or answering their queries.

Voicemail systems do neither. Conservatives point out that the inherent nonsense of the data collection methodology is shown by the fact that the Council could claim a perfect 100% performance if no-one answered calls and all calls were instead diverted to voicemail!

 Said, Peter Forrest, Conservatives GLA candidate for Enfield-Haringey:

"These are phoney figures. It is a nonsense to count calls diverted to voicemail or to mobile phones [and thence to voicemail] as 'answered'. Callers want to speak to real people and for the Council to count those calls diverted to voicemail as 'answered' is massaging the numbers and tantamount to fiddling the figures.

Rather than rushing into print with a regurgitated version of the Council's own data it is a pity that the Lib-Dem so-called 'official opposition' did not read the papers more thoroughly".

ENDS.

Notes to Editors: 1. Data/calls answered criteria taken from paper 13 "Corporate

Telephone Monitoring" to the Council's Executive on 10 June 2003 (para 5.7).