A COMPUTER crash left hundreds of City of York Council staff "twiddling their thumbs" - for the second time in a week.

All departments were affected as the system went down yesterday morning, making terminals relied on by up to 1,100 members of staff unusable and access to files stored on computers impossible.

Experts were beginning to restore the system as workers left for home yesterday evening.

But the breakdown meant a massive amount of council work went undone.

The system had also crashed on Wednesday morning, and was not restored then until 4pm.

Opposition leader Steve Galloway is to meet chief executive David Atkinson on Monday to ask about the costs in terms of lost productivity, and discover what effect there has been on services.

"Most importantly, I want to know why we should have this failure of a system which is less than a year old and has been recommended by our IT professionals as the best," he said. "It is a matter of very great concern."

A council worker, who asked not to be named, said: "This has been going on for months and months and people are getting extremely fed up with it.

"Most people can do some administration without the use of computers, but when that's done there's nothing they can do."

He said the system crash meant the financial management system, involved in tracking the council's budget, was out of order, email was down and even word processing could not be done.

And he said the problem had been recurring for months.

"A new server was installed about a year ago, and for some reason it keeps going down," said the worker.

"We are left just twiddling our thumbs while they try to fix it, and that it's happened twice in one week is disgraceful."

A council spokesman said: "We have had a problem with one of our major computing systems and we are doing all that we can to get things back to normal as soon as possible."

He said all customer facilities were maintained using emergency equipment, and essential services were targeted as priorities by staff trying to restore the system.

Updated: 11:01 Saturday, December 08, 2001