The Secretary of State for Justice, Pedro Ferrão Tavares, said this Thursday that waiting times for attendance at Registry services “have been greatly reduced”, due to the relief provided by the automatic renewal of the citizen card.
“Waiting times have been greatly reduced, because as we have automatic renewal of the citizen card, we managed to relieve a lot of pressure on services“, the official told the Lusa agency, after a visit to the Registry services in Évora.
Pedro Ferrão Tavares pointed out that the assistance related to the citizen card was concentrated “much of the effort” in the services, noting, however, that this document, for about a year, has been automatically renewed.
“We have already removed almost two million calls from the citizen card and there will be about three million at the end of September, which means that It is a very big relief in terms of assistance pressure“, he wrinkled.
According to the Secretary of State, in addition to the automatic renewal of the citizen card, the Registry services also have “more responsive” for the “very strong and accentuated reinforcement in assistance”.
“In the vast majority of cases, even in urban centers, the waiting time is short,” he insisted, noting that citizens can use the keys of the sigaApp application, which allows them to know the average waiting time.
The official maintained that the problems in the service were due to the need to “relocate” the employees of the “prior appointment service”, due to the covid-19 pandemic.
“But we no longer have to make an appointment in advance,” he said, and what “happens many times” is that citizens try to make an appointment in advance through the Internet and the available date is “llong term and I think there are no passwords until then“.
“But that’s not true. Just go to a counter and you can get service,” he added.
In statements to Lusa, the Secretary of State for Justice revealed that a process of renewal and modernization of the Registry services service model is underway, with funding from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).
“We are talking about renewing physical spaces and it is not only in terms of image“, but also “adapt and adjust the service model to the concerns” of users and employees, he said.
According to Pedro Ferrão Tavares, the value of the investment in the PRR for Registry services amounts to 42.5 million euros.
It is an opportunity for us to change the services and also the attention capacity, not only in the logic that the citizen has to go to the Registry”, he stressed.
The Secretary of State gave as examples of future developments the automatic communication of the birth of a child between “Health and the Registry” or the communication within the public administration itself about “a mandatory declaration by a company”.
This visit to the Registry services in Évora was part of the Road Map for Justice, which began in May, which consists of a series of visits by members of the Government to various facilities in the sector.
The objective of this roadmap, according to the Ministry of Justice, is to contact the workers, survey the main needs of the services and identify opportunities for improvement and priorities for action.
Source: Observadora
