WEST Devon Borough Council is to encourage more of its customers to go online to pay council tax and access council services — starting with trialling a self-serve desk in the council’s reception in Tavistock in the New Year.

The borough-wide review of customer services also recommends withdrawing the Northern Outreach service offered on Wednesdays at the Ockment Centre in Okehampton from April next year, with the money being used instead to pay for council locality officers visiting more vulnerable people in their own homes across the borough.

The report prepared by Councillor Jeff Moody, portfolio holder for Customer First, says that it costs just 14p for a customer to carry out a transaction on the council website compared with £2.68 to answer a telephone call and £7.43 to deal with a customer face-to-face.

The council meanwhile puts the cost of its face-to-face Northern Outreach service on Wednesdays at the Ockment Centre in Okehampton being the most expensive, costing £49.34 per visitor (based on the service having just three visitors per day).

The report was considered and approved by the council’s hub committee on Tuesday (November 5) and will go ahead if approved by the meeting of the full council on December 10.

It is planned to introduce the new proposals at the start of April next year — with staff to be posted in the Tavistock reception in the New Year to show people how to do their council transactions online.

It is also being suggested that Citizens Advice offices and others with offices in the community could host a council computer.

Concerns were raised by Cllrs Patrick Kimber (Hatherleigh) and Tony Leech (Okehampton North) about whether too much work would be put on the council’s locality officers if they had to take on more home visits as a result of the cutting of the face-to-face services. Currently the council is one locality officer down.

However, council chief executive Sophie Hosking responded: ‘We are not getting a huge amount of demand for these kind of visits. Absolutely, though, we will staff to meet demand.

‘Truthfully we haven’t got data to suggest that there are people queuing up in our communites wanting to get hold of us because there are an awful lot of ways that enable them to do that.’