RESIDENTS should be able to ring up City of York Council in the early evening by this time next year.

The authority is pressing ahead with plans to provide late opening hours at a new customer centre, in spite of union concerns about the impact on staff's "work life balance".

But the executive decided against opening on Saturday mornings - at least for the time being.

The changes are part of the council's easy@york initiative, which is aimed at improving customer access to council services.

Other changes include making more information available online and the faster resolution of queries.

Heather McKenzie, of the Unison union, told the executive that staff had real worries about potential changes to working hours and the effect on their lives.

She said: "We would like to see management adopt a gradual and flexible approach when implementing any change, and work with staff preferences and choices so that staff do not find themselves forced into working patterns which are detrimental to them."

The customer centre is likely to be operational in November - with other services, such as benefits, being transferred in following months.

Councillors voted to extend opening hours on weekdays from 8am to 7pm, with a future review of whether it should open on Saturday mornings as well. Officers said delaying the introduction of Saturday opening would give a chance to assess the take-up of the new weekday opening hours.

Council leader Steve Galloway, said if all went to plan, the new opening hours would be introduced by late spring next year.

Meanwhile, councillors were told there had been a massive upsurge in the use of the internet to access council information.

Seven hundred people a day were viewing the authority's website to find out information about car parking availability and roadworks, equating to a quarter of a million web views per year. More than 7,000 motorists used their mobile phones to pay their parking fees in the four months since the new form of payment was introduced. Thousands of people had viewed planning applications online, and used the site to calculate their benefits.

Updated: 09:51 Thursday, May 04, 2006