Citizens Service Centre opens in Limassol

A NEW Citizens Service Centre opened in Limassol yesterday, which will serve as a central hub where citizens can have their questions answered about municipal and government issues and receive a range of government services such as applying for passports and identification cards.

The centre, a kind of one-stop government shop, is designed to facilitate the public by saving them from having to travel to remote or hard-to-find government offices where they might get tangled up in a bureaucratic knot.

Coming less than a year after the first centre opened in Nicosia last year, President Tassos Papadopoulos spoke yesterday at the centre’s opening ceremony, claiming that it was part of an ongoing effort for citizens to “have a fast and substantially improved service from an effective municipality that secures their rights.”

”Today, 11 months later, 85,000 citizens who use the services of the Centre in Nicosia confirmed that the Citizens Service Centre constitute a modern response to the problems of bureaucracy,” Papadopoulos said.

As with the Nicosia centre, the Limassol centre is equipped with the following four information systems: the Civil Registration and Migration System, the Road Transport System, the Social Insurance System, and the Grants and Benefits System.
The government claims that by “exploiting the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the citizen can be served easily, quickly and effectively for 64 different services, by just visiting the Citizen Service Centre once; and thus avoiding the hassle of moving from Ministry to Ministry and from Department to Department.”

Papadopoulos said that 1,800 citizens per week use the Nicosia Citizens Service Centre, with 1,000 visiting the site and 800 contacting the centre by telephone.

The government has pledged to open Citizens Service Centres in every district, with the next one set to open in Polis Chrysochou.

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