BIRMINGHAM City Council’s under-fire call centre is in trouble again – this time over claims it has failed to deal promptly with pleas to pick up rubbish sacks missed by binmen and requests for household bulky waste collections.

A scrutiny committee hit out at a “lack of accuracy and information” by staff at the centre, which deals with 1.4 million calls a year.

Councillors said they were inundated with complaints from voters about the length of time telephone calls to the centre took to process.

The panel also heard there was mounting concern about poor communication with the council’s refuse depots, which meant requests for rubbish to be picked up could take days or even more than a week to be processed. Edgbaston councillor James Hutchings, pictured below, said he was on the phone for 20 minutes attempting to get sacks of rubbish picked up from three streets where collections had been missed by bin crews.

“It was a terribly small matter, just a few bags. Of course, nothing happened until the crews came the following week,” Coun Hutchings said.

But he said that, when he telephoned the depot directly – bypassing the call centre – the rubbish was picked up within half an hour.

The privately-run call centre is supposed to save money for the council by making it easier for people to get in touch. It has been the subject of numerous complaints, and last month council housing chief John Lines said he was so fed up with poor service that he was considering scrapping a £2 million contract his department had with the centre and moving responsibility for answering calls back in-house.

Coun Hutchings urged the refuse collection and street cleaning service to consider following Coun Lines by putting the call centre on notice to do better.