The Baird government will slash opening hours at Service NSW centres from Monday, making life harder for NSW residents and abandoning a promise to put customers at the heart of government.
Service NSW was rolled out as a "one stop shop" for citizens to conveniently renew licences, apply for permits and certificates, sit tests or make complaints, open 7am to 7pm weekdays, and until 3pm on Saturday.
Former premier Barry O'Farrell declared Service NSW's extended opening hours were needed to transform the customer experience because small business people struggled to get to a government office during regular hours.
But from Monday, 30 branches, including Parramatta, Rockdale, Ryde, Castle Hill and Penrith in metropolitan Sydney, as well as Newcastle and Wollongong, will be reduced to 8.30am to 5.30pm trading on weekdays. Ten branches will close at 5pm.
Regional towns will be the worst hit, with 12 branches to close at 4.30pm, and 16 not opening until 9am. Seventeen branches will be closed on Saturday, while 23 branches will close at noon.
Customer service staff will only be available on the "24/7" telephone hotline from 7am and 7pm on weekdays.
The shopfronts replaced 57 motor registries that were shut down and sold off for $45 million by the O'Farrell and Baird governments, and 15 Fair Trading offices that closed. Births, Deaths and Marriages branches were halved and NSW Trustee and Guardian offices also slashed, with customers instead diverted to Service NSW to complete 800 government transactions.
The cutbacks come despite a Fairfax Media analysis of Google data on "popular times" to visit Service NSW branches showing customers regularly at centres early in the morning before work, and after 6pm.
"Imagine being able to drop into a shopfront in Kiama at 6.30pm on a Friday night on your way to a fishing holiday to register your boat because you forgot to do it before you left Sydney ... or renew your plumber's licence at 2pm on a Saturday because it's the only free time you have after a busy week," Mr O'Farrell said in a 2013 speech.
From Monday, neither option will be available at Kiama.
Wynyard in the CBD will be the only Service NSW office open until 7pm each weeknight.
NSW Labor's finance and services spokesman, Cessnock MP Clayton Barr, said there had been little to no communication about the cutbacks.
"Mike Baird said he would make it 'easier for the people of New South Wales' but instead he's making it more difficult for people to renew their licences and pay for rego outside working hours," he said.
He said Service NSW should be there to help the community and was "not a corporate business".
"Customers that have been using Service NSW outside of busy times, like in the morning and in the late afternoon, should be encouraged – not shut out of vital services," he said.
Service NSW said branch hours were changing after its data "showed little demand for the majority of service centres before 8.30am and after 5.30pm".
"In some centres only a handful of customers are walking through the door before 8am and after 5.30pm," said a spokeswoman.
But independent Google data shows Service NSW branches being regularly used by customers from 7am, at Castle Hill, Ryde, Chatswood and Warners Bay, and from 8am at Penrith, Parramatta, Botany, Hornsby and Wagga. In Kiama, 8am Wednesdays is the daily peak.
"Much like we compute traffic data based on the anonymised aggregated movement of people on the road, we are able to determine relatively how busy a place may be throughout the day," said a Google spokesman.
Minister for Finance and Services Dominic Perrottet said more staff would be put on during the busiest hours.
"We are tailoring our services to the times when people most need them," he said.
"We can't waste taxpayer dollars staffing centres serving no one, so we're putting our staff where our customers are."
An Auditor-General's report into Service NSW in February blasted the $1 billion spent on creating the service. Service NSW told the Auditor-General its revised business case would reduce full-time staff and save the government $698 million over 10 years by consolidating shopfronts.
Kiosks in shopping centres would be opened because they require less staff.
