‘GRIPE LINE’

Call centre for Bajans to file complaints about bad public service – PM

By Shamar Blunt

A call centre is to go live “before Independence Day” to allow Barbadians to record complaints about bad service from government agencies, Prime Minister Mia Mottley has announced.

The platform is to be overseen by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, Senator Shantal Munro-Knight, said Mottley during Monday night’s Parish Speaks in Christ Church at the Christ Church Foundation School.

Mottley expressed concern about a growing number of Barbadians complaining about the level of service and lack of responses they frequently receive when interacting with government offices, and she expressed hope that the upcoming grievance platform will go a long way toward addressing the situation.

She said: “We have been telling the ministers and the permanent secretaries and the heads of agencies, as God is my witness, that we need [as] a basic courtesy, is to respond and follow through. That is why we are establishing a call centre and a social media platform for the grievance mechanism.

“Minister Monroe-Knight, she is the one working on getting the grievance procedure up for me. We are just waiting to get the engagement of the people who have to run the call centre so that we can go live hopefully by November. Before Independence Day I want to go live.”

The prime minister went on to say that while she understands that certain agencies may be coping with a high volume of calls, resulting in extended response times, more has to be done to efficiently respond to residents’ concerns.

She told Christ Church residents: “We used to be the country that said ‘good morning’, and ‘please’, and ‘thank you’, and understand the basic civil courtesies that make life a little easier for everybody. I ain’t telling you [that] you can always answer everybody because sometimes I get 500 WhatsApp [messages] in a day, but I try to put systems in place.

“I feel you have to be able to answer people, so . . . I will speak to the head of the public service again, I’ll speak to the Cabinet again, I’ll speak to the heads of agencies as we are meeting, and to indicate that part of the performance review mechanism of people doing their job is not just to have to substantive knowledge, but it’s to answer the phone.”

At the meeting, a wide range of complaints were lodged by residents, including that several coconut vendors in various parts of the ABC Highway were still leaving discarded coconut shells and other objects in the areas where they ply their trade. The prime minister said she has asked the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Public Works to intervene.

She said: “I have asked the Ministry of Commerce to be able to meet with the Ministry of Public Works to be able to create lay-bys off the highway so that anyone wanting to purchase, whether it is coconuts or vegetables or any of that, can do so safely. We have, because things were tight for a while, a lot of people said leave them, and I am saying ‘no’.

“I am not happy with the pace of execution, and that is not a secret, but by the same token, I would want and I would hope that the public health persons would also speak to them because I have said to them, even if you are there until we do the lay-by, you have to clean up the coconuts and the shells and move them.”

Director of the Environmental Protection Department, Anthony Headley, addressing other concerns, said that more 600 derelict vehicles will be removed throughout the country in the coming months, in an effort to decrease the health and environmental hazards they continue to create for residents.

He said his agency was in the final planning stages of a major exercise, which will see a number of abandoned vehicles being removed from several areas.

“We run the Derelict Vehicles Programme; this programme is a programme designed to remove health nuisances under the Health Services Act. Currently, we are preparing to issue some contracts to start the removal of 619 derelict vehicles from across all the parishes in Barbados.

Headley advised Barbadians to use WhatsApp number 826-5623 to report any abandoned cars in their area, but also added that an app is currently available on the department’s website for public use.

“You can provide all of the information, not just for derelict buildings or derelict vehicles. You can go into this app, you can provide a pin and upload the details to the app. What that does is that it provides us with a location . . . . When we go on the Land Registry, we can identify the owner of the property and then we can import all of that information directly into our database to start managing it,” Headley explained.

Mottley added that the government had already started the process of developing mechanical bays around the island for mechanics to use, which would reduce the number of abandoned vehicles in some communities.

Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology Davidson Ishmael reported that the bay in Grazettes has already been completed and others are in the works.

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb