The following message has been approved by Taxation Manager James Taylor for display on the Council’s social media and website channels:

Customer Services are continuing to handle increased numbers of enquiries in particular for Council Tax and Non-Domestic Rates. If you have sent an Email you should receive an automated acknowledgement and should not need to follow-up your Email as Customer Services will be in touch in due course.

Note At the time of writing this news item, Customer Services have a total of 1177 Emails (1252 if you count SPAM Emails) so I do not anticipate seeing a return to pre-Ctax annual billing levels for a minimum of 2 weeks (potentially 4 weeks). As a result, I would like to take this opportunity to remind CC Advisors that there is no pressure is being placed on you to handle more than one enquiry at a time with phone calls being the main priority.

If any member of staff has any questions or concerns please speak to Senior Advisors in the first instance.

Barry Murphy has been dismissed from his role at Reception with immediate effect and as a result I am now working with Andy and HR to consider how best to fill this role going forward, Donna.

Please note the availability of services will be different on 1st and 8th of May in accordance with the office closures for Mayday and the King's Coronation public holidays.

M-Connect: No bookings to be made for 1st of May, business as usual on 8th.

Housing Repairs: No jobs to be raised on 1st or 8th. Calendar to be blocked off for these dates by service.

Bulky Uplifts: Bookings can be made as normal for both dates. Business as usual.

Any questions, please raise via your Senior in the first instance.

Please be aware that there is an issue with one of the servers this morning and there is no access from Lagan into online forms. As a result, when advisors try to open a form completed from the customer portal (e.g. Garden Waste Permit), the connection will fail. ICT have contacted the Infrastructure team to look at the problem and will let update here as soon as it’s sorted.

For the time being, please do not open any emails that are generated from online forms, for example Roads Reports, Garage Applications, Revenues COA's, etc.

Update 10:30 - Please note the issue with online forms has now been resolved by ICT. Any further issues, please report to your Senior in the first instance.

Please note we are aware of an intermittent issue with Pay360 today where calls are being disconnected before payment is made.

This has been passed to Banking for investigation and this post will be updated as and when we have more information.

Update 14:45 - Please be advised this issue is resolved for the time being. If there are any further issues of this nature please report via your Senior in the first instance.