Conducting official business with the Generalitat no longer necessarily means traveling to Barcelona or facing long queues. In less than a year, the government's new citizen service channels have processed almost 5,000 transactions. These figures encompass services provided via the Virtual Office through video calls and those offered by mobile Citizen Service Offices (OACs) that visit smaller municipalities in adapted vans.
The video call service, operational since last October, has completed 3,588 transactions. Among the most requested procedures are registration for stable partnerships (2,003 applications), as well as recognition of disability status or dependency. This service, accessible via the gencat.cat portal, schedules 180 weekly appointments. Future plans include simultaneous translation for deaf individuals and the option to request sign language interpreters, with extensions to Arabic and Urdu.
Concurrently, five mobile units have traveled to over 200 rural municipalities since April. Distributed across five territorial routes (central, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest), these mobile offices bring services like idCAT Mòbil or dependency recognition directly to village squares. The service has recorded 1,181 interactions, with the southwest route being the busiest (382 transactions), followed by the northeast (319), southeast (186), central (166), and northwest (128). A remarkable 98% of users report being satisfied or very satisfied with the assistance received.
“"The objective is to prevent bureaucracy or the digital sphere itself from creating a distance between citizens and their institutions."
Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, emphasizes that the initiative aims to bring public services closer and eliminate the need for constant travel to Barcelona. The government combines the opening of physical offices in all regional divisions, with new locations planned in Sabadell and Penedès, alongside mobile and digital services. Dalmau notes that the current priority is to consolidate the existing five routes before considering expansion, while acknowledging the pending challenge of matching the range of services offered at physical OACs across both channels.
