At the DALC AGM in October 2023, we asked delegates to tell us about their challenges, their opportunities, how DALC could help and what services were most needed. We asked because we wanted to know the answers and we wanted to be able to act on them. You told us about the difficulties with working with the other tiers of local government. You confirmed that advice, information and training are the valued core services – and someone mentioned the restrictions of a Monday-Thursday advice line.
That was 20 months ago. Since then, we’ve signed a Civic Agreement with the County Council to work collaboratively; we have advised on district/local council co-working; we’ve invested in staffing our advice and information service with the result that . . . see a bit further below.
The voice of the membership is essential to DALC. It guides our future planning as you can see from our staff investment. We need your input into our next phase of planning. Look out for a survey coming over the next few weeks – you say, we do. We can’t do it without you.
We have had a number of requests from member councils to expand our opening hours to include Friday opening. DALC is a small team of part-time staff, so has not been in a position to deliver this up till now.
Last year, we hired a Member Services Assistant, Karen Chapman. We are absolutely delighted to announce that Karen has now progressed to hold the post of Member Services Officer. She is an invaluable member of the DALC team and many of you will have already met Karen through our Advice Service or at a DALC event.
This means we are now able to trial Friday opening hours. From next week, our opening hours will now be Monday to Friday 9am – 2pm. We will be trialling this for 6 months and will then review the impact on our team and services.
We hope this change makes it easier for our member councils to reach DALC throughout the week, whether by phone or email. If we’re unable to take your call, please leave a voicemail — we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Our Service Level Agreement says that we will aim to acknowledge all queries within 3 working days. In 2024/25, 52% of queries received a same-day response and 94% of queries received a response within 3 working days. While we do make every effort to provide a quick response, we do encourage member councils to make contact with us as early as possible to help avoid delays.
We very much welcome feedback from our members, and with the addition of this extra Member Services post, we are delighted that we are now able to trial expanding our service provision.