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Why ‘customer’ tag is misnomer
• IN your last issue, John Gulliver reported his discovery, through the Freedom of Information Act, of the wallet-bulging fee of one of Camden Council’s hired temps (The man with the golden pay packet, Nov 9).
Also noteworthy is the job title – Interim Head of Customer Services.
A council spokeswoman apparently told your columnist that this gold-plated individual had helped in “re-designing the way we interact with our customers”.
Since Camden Council is a statutory public authority and not a commercial business, it does not have “customers,” it deals with residents, citizens and service users.
However, visit, for example, a local library, housing office or council tax department and we are now – in the marketised world of New Labour – accorded this inappropriate customer epithet.
Local authorities, though, are not the only public service-providers to deploy such linguistic tosh.
The BBC’s John Humphrys, in his book Lost for Words, has a chapter headed the Twisted Words of Politics.
He describes interviewing the head of the Inland Revenue, who referred to tax payers as “customers”.
On pointing out the absurdity of this usage, Humphrys asked if he could, therefore, take his custom elsewhere.
There is hardly a public agency that has not been instructed to call the members of the public with which it has to deal customers. David Blunkett, when Home Secretary, insisted on the word in connection with the police, even when his radio interviewer found the terminology bizarre. Holloway Prison has actually placed a newspaper advertisement speaking of its “customers”.
It is in this way that New Labour has been attempting to link services with business. It has been enthusiastically aided by its compliant accomplices in the Town Hall.
ERIC KRIEGER
Haverstock Rd, NW5
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