A NEW report set to go before councillors next week has revealed that customer services staff at Dundee City Council handled more than 600,000 separate contacts during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Staff dealt with customers on line, by phone and email during 2020/21 and 2021/22 supporting them with issues ranging from grant applications and payments to help with food and medicine and welfare benefits.
John Alexander council leader said: “We knew that our staff were working extremely hard during the pandemic to help as many people as possible in whatever ways they could, but this report puts some figures on that, and these are truly breath-taking.
“Our front-line customer services and IT teams have provided a continuous service to mitigate the worst impacts of the pandemic throughout the past two years and I want to say a very public thank you to them for all their efforts, which I am sure will be echoed by the thousands of Dundonians helped by their prompt and efficient actions.”
The report, which will be considered by the council’s policy and resources committee on Monday (March 7), details the work done in a number of areas specific to the pandemic including, fuel well, advice in response to socio-economic issues, Covid hardship payments and self-isolation support grants.
These were delivered in addition to the service’s non-pandemic related workload which includes Universal Credit migration, school clothing grants, free school meals, Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and the Scottish Welfare Fund.
In the last 70 weeks for example since the self-isolation support grant scheme was launched, council advice services have processed 6861 applications for the grant, including 629 in a single week.
To date the fuel well scheme has paid out a total of £507,120 to 4088 households in the city across 2020/21 and 2021/22, as well as installing £200,000 worth of energy efficiency measures.
Dundee’s Scottish Welfare Fund saw a huge increase in activity during the pandemic. In the 12 months to the end of January this year the service saw 13,860 applications, its highest ever, comprising 10,983 Crisis Grants and 2,877 Community Care Grants.
Councillors will be told that going forward the advice strategy for Dundee is currently being reviewed, but it will continue to focus its efforts on supporting the most vulnerable members of society in conjunction with statutory and Third Sector partners.
Dundee City Council
Dundee draws skilled workers from a 60-minute catchment population of 640,000 and has a local population of over 140,000. The availability of a large pool of highly skilled labour is a key feature in the Dundee economy. Flexibility in the labour force is currently more prevalent in Dundee than in Scotland as a whole. All forms of labour market flexibility - part-time, temporary employment, self-employment and shift work - are widely operational within the city. Labour force stability in the city is excellent, enabling companies to plan with confidence. Labour turnover levels are less than 5% and absenteeism averages 2%.
