NI14 is a new statutory national indicator which sets out to measure the proportion of "customer contact that is avoidable", that is, measuring the number of repeat phone calls, meetings, e-mails, etc. (contacts) that could have been avoided if the particular public service did its job properly against the total number of such contacts in a year. The most important thought process in the implementation of this new legislation should be the results that could emanate from a positive approach to this indicator, through improving the citizen’s experience of dealing with, for instance Stoke-on-Trent City Council, by reducing wasted time on unnecessary contacts that could have been avoided by the Council getting it right first time.

All Councils are required to start collecting data in October 2008. Annual reporting to Government will commence at the end of the financial year 2008/09. Thereafter, data must be collected from April to March each year. Stoke-on-Trent City Council must analyse somewhat over one thousand contacts each year in total. The Audit Commission has provided a sample size table to show how many contacts should be analysed per total number of contacts in any particular service.


When the British government launched the Service Transformation Agreement in October 2007, the published document began with the heading “Vision”. The first six paragraphs contain some very telling statements:

Citizens’ time is not free, yet often the way public services are delivered assumes it to be so.
People are busier and their time is an increasingly precious commodity.

To use an economic term, the opportunity cost of building this series of websites has been huge - even at the National minimum wage, the chargeable cost of the time spent in providing this service to the community would probably have run into tens of thousands of pounds. Yet various Council departments, through their actions or lack thereof, have caused the expenditure of this time, when the various people involved in our actions could have been doing something else. The sooner that the functionaries of the Council realise that, although they are "doing their job" when meeting people or formulating policy, they are being paid for their time, sometimes on almost obscene payscales, while those on the other side of the fence are there either because they have no choice, or because the issue in question matters so much to them that they have chosen to volunteer their time.

The aim … is to change public services so they more often meet the needs of people and businesses, rather than the needs of government …
Service transformation is about changing public services so they are tailored more to the needs of people and businesses and less to the structures of government.
They expect services that respond to their individual needs … rather than to the needs of individual delivery agencies ….

These particular statements resonate particularly loudly with many involved with this site. The amount of time that has been spent requesting information from the Council, usually by having to resort to the Freedom of Information Act 2000, or searching documents to discover throwaway items that greatly affect our lives (viz. the closure of Dimensions), is astronomical. If the Council were to decide to impart information freely, openly and honestly, the needs of the people would more often be met. The obsessive need of our particular version of local government to conceal information from its citizenry is something that the average person in the street cannot and will not ever understand.

… the public service should get it right first time so that people do not have to initiate contact again and again …

Much of the contact that persons known to the authors of this site have had with the Council has been repetitive and unnecessary. Time and again, the Council's fixation with secrecy, and the prevalent attitude of "We're right and they're wrong" have caused grief, stress and anger.

… services that appear confusing and inaccessible may deter people from seeking them with the result that citizens are denied the help that the Government, in its policies, seeks to offer.

Once again, we are drawn back to Freedom of Information. Stoke-on-Trent City Council is so fiercely protective of information, that a certain Government policy (one that gives the right to citizens to seek information that should be theirs by right in an open and just society) is often perverted to the ends of the Council, or is even simply ignored.

The entire public sector faces a constant battle with "avoidable contact" ... This is contact that would not be necessary if the public sector could get things right first time. It simply frustrates customers and wastes their time; erodes public trust in government; clogs up government offices so that more important demand goes unmet; and wastes money.

We challenge any citizen of Stoke to truthfully say that this statement does not describe their City Council exactly.

The key aim of service transformation is to reduce the number of unnecessary contacts that people need to have with government.

Hooray!