A COUNCILLOR has questioned whether Durham County Council is ready for winter.

Liberal Democrat representative for Framwellgate and Newton Hall, Mark Wilkes was responding to statistics which showed the time it takes council staff to answer the phone has increased over the last year.

“We seem to be going backwards in the time is takes to answer phone calls,” he told Monday's meeting of the corporate overview and scrutiny management board.

“And we’re not even at that part of winter where we expect to get more calls because of bad weather. Are we suddenly going to see over the winter that we get even worse?”

According to a report, between October 2017 and this September it took an average of 57 seconds for council staff to answer phone calls from the public– ten seconds slower than the same period the previous year. In that time, the customer service department received more than 970,000 phone calls, accounting for 76 per cent of interactions with the public.

Council officers at the meeting said response time was an average across all areas on the council and the figures represented a ‘small proportion’ of the total data.

Coun Wilkes responded: “If it’s someone with a serious benefits issue they could be on for minutes, or someone with a problem with their bins could be through in 30 seconds. It would be good to see the [full] breakdown.”