Leader: Taxpayers and bin owners unite

Are you a patient, tax payer, resident or bin owner? Your council may view you as one or all of these but when it comes down to it, you're just a regular person, right?

That's why it's frustrating when you contact the council, something you usually avoid doing if possible, and are bounced around the various departments until you either find an answer, or are politely told to go away.

But things are set to change. The government is pushing councils to change the way they treat people and is insisting they adopt customer relations management (CRM) strategies to find out what the public want in exchange for paying their taxes.

Many councils are using technology to collect data on 'customers' (no longer tax payers or patients) to solve the CRM problem. The question is whether this is really going to work.

It would be safe to assume that most people dislike waiting and being treated as patients, tax payers, residents and bin owners but disjoined local authority departments still subject folk to the same indignities of being 'customers' not people.

So what's the answer? Many in the public sector would argue there has been a top-down shake up in local government thinking but to the regular person on the street, this is currently making little impact.

As councils appear to be mimicking the private sector and throwing all their money into technology to improve services, we need to ask whether they are using the right resources.

If local authorities are to be successful in improving the end product, they need to embrace a change in philosophy and ensure not only queuing times are cut but citizens, bin owners and the rest are treated as people. The business case for technology comes afterwards.