COUNCIL staff have been praised for the way they have responded to the challenges of the coronavirus crisis.

And lockdown has accelerated existing plans Swindon Borough Council had to allow remote working

Chief operating officer Sam Mowbray told councillors on the authority’s corporate and resources overview and scrutiny committee: “Our IT has been very resilient and that’s down to a lot of hard work by the team.

“They had done a lot of preparation over the last two or three years to increase the resilience of our IT systems. We had seen more resistance than we’d have liked, to be honest, to using remote working but it meant when it had to work we were able to do it straight away.”

Ms Mowbray said the council had spent about £34,000 on equipment, such as chairs and screens to allow staff to work properly from home, and scores of staff were issued with laptops.

She praised IT staff for their work and said that the council’s website capacity was increased to cope with higher demand from customers.

New technology has been used to allow contact centre staff to take calls at home on their laptops, while meetings have been enabled from anywhere and social workers have been able to hold video conferences with the people in their care when doing so face-to-face is impossible.