For better services WHEN 89 per cent of applications for land titles and 53 per cent of plans submitted to the Survey Department by land surveyors are rejected, something is wrong. In the view of the Minister of Lands and the Environment, Seymour Mullings, speaking in the Sectoral Debate last week, the fault lies with the professionals preparing these documents. Carelessness may well be a factor, but we urge the Minister and the public servants under his direction to consider whether design and procedures are sufficiently simple and straightforward to allow easy compliance. Simply blaming the failures and urging them to do better so that the 'achievements' of the service provider can be greater is not good enough. From time to time talk of the Citizen's Charter resurfaces. The whole idea is to provide better service to citizens. A key principle of the Citizen's Charter is that the needs of the citizen client come first, as in competitive private enterprise. There has been a steady flow of numerous complaints about the operations of the various land agencies. A new executive agency, the National Land Agency, has been created, combining the Office of Titles with the Departments of Survey, Land Valuation, and Lands and Estate Management. The Minister says the merger will enable the Government to provide more efficient services. But bigger is not necessarily better. There have to be substantially new and better ways of doing things. The place to start is to listen to the feedback of users of the services, particularly their complaints, in the spirit of satisfying the needs of clients as painlessly as possible. This is the spirit and intention of the Citizen's Charter which is behind the creation of executive agencies. The Minister's own statistics of service failure rates should be a wake-up call to providing better more user-friendly service, not a stick with which to chastise 'careless' users. The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner.
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