WEBSITES for councils in Worcestershire are not good enough, according to a report.

The websites for Worcestershire county, Worcester city, Malvern Hills and Wychavon district councils have all been slammed for not being customer friendly.

Visitors to the sites find them hard to use, and evidence suggests the demand is there to use them more often if they can be improved. Plans are in place to implement improvements, which are needed to help encourage more people to use self-service mechanisms, such as paying bills online, which in turn saves councils money.

At a recent meeting of Worcestershire County Council’s overview and scrutiny performance board, Councillor Bob Banks, who led the scrutiny task group, said: “We think there are a few lumps and bumps in the online offering which need to be looked at.”

Councillor Juliet Brunner said: “The website these days is paramount. I know I would prefer to go straight on the website and sort it out rather than going on the phone and listening to that music.”

Soctim (the Society for Information Technology Management), which is the professional association for information technology managers working in, and for, the public sector in the UK, compared local authority websites looking at factors such as ease of access to information, carrying out transactions, resilience and volume of use.

The county and district websites all rated only one or two stars out of a possible four-star rating. The county council’s own research from its May 2010 ViewPoint Survey suggests the demand is there to use online services which are much cheaper than any other form.

For example, transaction costs using face-to-face methods cost £8.23 per visitor, are £3.21 per phone call, but 39p per website user.

A passage in the report said the county council, together with the Worcestershire Hub and district councils, is “responding to these low ratings and aiming to improve by updating our online services”.