A Brighton woman was bemused to be sent a letter from the council offering her the chance to pay online by clicking the words “pay on-line now” printed on a piece of paper.
Nicole Cozens was sent the letter by Brighton and Hove City Council asking her to pay a £75 fine – but the letter appeared to include a print out of an online payment button without the full hyperlink.
She managed to pay the fine online by finding the full printed hyperlink on another page included in the envelope – only to find the amount she needed to pay was higher than the figure quoted in print.
She said: “Printing out a hyperlink and then posting the letter means I now can’t click on the link, and you need to include the full web address.
“On another letter in the same envelope they have given more info on how to pay online. But still …
“I also just logged on to pay and they have the amount wrong (£75 rather than £60).”
Dear @BrightonHoveCC . Printing out a hyperlink and then posting the letter means I now can’t click on the link, and you need to include the full Web address 🤦🏻♀️ pic.twitter.com/Z0rbjTaPQC
— Nicole Cozens ( she/her ) (@nicole_cozens) December 6, 2022
A council spokesperson said: “We are of course aware that the printed letters for attendance penalty charges do not allow for linking directly to the payment page.
“This is why we include a hyperlink in the letters.
“We are looking into whether we can run our system via email in the future, which would will sort out this issue.
“Whenever residents query an attendance penalty charge we contact them to try and resolve the issue and remind them of different ways they can pay the fine.
“These include a 24-hour telephone payment line.”
Nobody ever said they were bright.
would a QR have been better ?
A few weeks back I got a letter from them notifying me of a revised planning application very close by, and the following day I got a duplicate letter. Both of them advised me that if I wished to comment I had to quote some kind of number ‘shown below’. There was no number anywhere below, but I managed to comment anyway. So the tentative conclusion has to be that they’re not much good at communications despite having a ‘communications team’ of about 25 or so people, most of whom could probably be dispensed with.
They are all probably still working from home and have not looked at a letter in years.
I had a similar issue when renewing my garden waste collection. I received an email containing a link for renewal saying I just needed my address and card details. The link took me to a page asking for a reference number that I was supposed to have received by post. I requested a reference number, only to receive another email asking me to renew. I eventually got an email response giving me a reference number but never did get the letter.
Chris,
I had a similar experiance trying to renew my brown bin collection and received three emails but no letter – eventually I had to phone up to obtain this reference number. Ironically once I’d paid the fee the council then missed two collection dates in a row.
Never normal Brighton.
It’s fascinating, but also worrying, the way that various aspects of our City council’s conduct emerge once the media begins to shine a light (for which we all need to be grateful!).
Not wishing to be a harbinger of doom, and knowing little of the technical intricacies of scamming, beyond hearing of the sad plight of tens of thousands of UK victims, our Council’s ineptitude in creating common-sense logical systems, for many areas of its activities (as if Town Hall officers don’t want us taxpayers to know anything about their workings?) looks like there might be a literally golden opportunity here for scammers!
Apparently the most skilled being paid staff of security services around the world, in training for cyber warfare, and possibly being awarded a bonus according to how much money they’ve stolen?
BTW, does anyone know why the governments of the OECD countries have not yet ring-fenced their banking systems, to quarantine all unusual deposits for up to, say, 6 months, so that the police can trace and recover stolen money within such a time-frame?
And then we move to the aspect of being able to make payments by telephone 24/7.
In a City where the night-time and weekend economy is so important many are likely to be wondering why our Council does not operate a 24/7 Helpline?
Some marginal services purport to offer an out-of-hours telephone service, but many anecdotes indicate that, more often than not, it’s only an answerphone that’s on duty!
And to a visitor needing advice or information on a Friday evening, or on a Saturday or a Sunday, it’s really unhelpful for a recorded message to say their enquiry will be looked at on Monday – when by then they’re likely to have returned home!
But then; among almost all of us who’ve lived here for some years we sadly know it’s a ‘Bullying Council’ that’s been blighting our lives, including those of many of the lower-paid staff, with the Council’s middle-rankers and seniors seeming to take a perverse pleasure in their inexcusable operation of a ‘Hostile Environment’, especially when our sadly-missed Hove Borough Council seemed to take a pride in going the extra mile to positively SERVE its residents (and visitors too!).
So the assumption has to be that this 24/7 telephone payment function had been contracted out – but at what price and, if so, were the Councillors on any of our committees given a debate in which to consider such a proposal?
Yes, senior council officers do have Delegated Powers to enter into contracts up to a set value (with apparent vagueness as to whether that ceiling applies to just each of the individual years of a multi-year contract, or to the total anticipated spend over the entirety of a multi-year contract? But who’s worried – we sadly have a council culture where: ‘Wiggle-room is us’, when applied to the de-facto non-accountability of senior Council officers! Whilst those self-same seniors apply brutal and inhumane repression to us residents, and to less-senior council employees!).
Hopefully some of our elected Councillors will find the time to fully-investigate these inexcusable inadequacies?
And, given our council’s long-standing slogan of ‘Be Local – Buy Local’ (but ignored far too frequently by the council itself!) why direct employment by the council of City jobseekers for an in-house 24/7 service, with salaries of at least the much-vaunted Local Living Wage, does not appear to have happened?
Especially as many of us residents know there are many issues for an out-of-hours team to handle – not least, for example, being that of hearing the terrifying sound of a chainsaw at 6am on a Saturday morning from scoundrels cutting down a tree, TPO or not, for cash-in-hand from a greedy property developer!
So please, Councillors, let’s urgently see some positive and constructive action from you – that is; more than just plain criticism and party-political mud-slinging!
Please show, by your positive work, that you’re worthy of the trust placed in you by those who gave their vote to you!