Senate and districts will still need several months, if not years, to achieve the 14-day goal when booking an appointment with the Citizens’ Registration Office. This emerges from the Senate’s response to a written question from MP Hendrikje Klein (left), which is exclusively available to the Tagesspiegel.
The number of missed appointments per month to meet the 14-day target set out in the government policy guidelines is reported to be around 70,000. Since the announced hiring of 100 employees will create an additional 20,000 appointment booking options per month, there remains a gap of 50,000 appointments. In plain language this means that almost a third of the 170,000 appointment bookings on average per month will not be able to be served within 14 days in the future either. The up to five additional planned citizen office locations will not change that much.
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In addition, the appointments that arise as a result of the increase in jobs are only fully available when, firstly, all positions are filled and, secondly, all new employees have been fully trained. Both can take a while, after all, not all available positions have already been filled, and the districts complain about high staff turnover in the citizen registration offices.
The first employees recruited through a central recruitment service are to be hired in October. 20 additional positions will be advertised in a so-called reserve pool. They should cushion short-term “load peaks” and be able to be used flexibly at individual locations.
Klein, spokeswoman for personnel and administration for the left-wing faction, welcomed the planned increase in jobs in principle. She spoke out in favor of intensifying efforts to digitize citizen services in order to relieve the burden on the citizen registration offices. “I assume that the measures that have now been announced will help us,” said Klein.
In addition to the increase in staff, a task review for the transfer of services to other administrative units and the improvement of the time management system for appointment booking are planned. The latter should be supported by a needs analysis.
