Renters United says tenants are being frustrated by long delays trying to get their bond back from the government agency that holds it.Tenancy Services has implemented a system capping incoming phone calls, meaning once a certain number of calls are in the system, a caller can't get through.This has led to some people spending days trying to call the service, which they need to do to get their tenant number, to then agree on a bond refund.At the end of last month the agency launched a new online programme to manage bonds replacing a previous manual process.Hugo, a Wellington renter, lately had a simple query he wanted an answer to - did Tenancy Services have his bond lodged?"I tried on a Monday morning to call them and I got into the queue and it said, 'Do you want to call back or stay on the line?' And so I said, 'Oh, I'll stay on the line.' 20 minutes later, haven't heard anything. I'm at work, so I just need to continue working, so I hung up," he told Nine to Noon.He tried again later that day, no answer; requested a callback, no one called. '"That's really frustrating… we were just trying to get some clarity on something quite simple. But I can also imagine it's really stressful for the people who work there who know that this is happening."He eventually got through several days later, only to find the landlord had not actually lodged the bond, as was legally required.Renters United president Luke Somerville said his organisation was receiving a lot of complaints. He said many tenants needed their bond refunded so they could pay the bond at a new rental, and delays have led to people needing to borrow or use savings."The government has rolled out the red carpet for landlords - they've done the interest deductibility, there's no-cause evictions now. And something as simple as getting your bond back seems to be quite complicated."He said landlords were frequently failing to lodge bonds and getting away with it, or trying to "gouge" tenants when they leave and want their money back.He said while there was an online system for checking the basics, anything more complicated - such as challenging a landlord on bond issues - needed to be done manually, over the phone, and there did not seem to be enough spent on services to mediate these issues."I think the assumption on the current system that we have is that the landlord and the renter are going to agree, and that there's not going to be any problems. But the problem, I mean, there's always problems between landlords and renters."Time of changeKat Watson, head of Tenancy Services, said there had been "some really big changes" made in the last 18 months."We've been phasing and moving away from completely manually processed tenancy bond activities. We do about half-a-million of them a year and we've been doing them manually. That can create errors, it can create delays."Landlords were now able to lodge bonds digitally, she said, speeding up the process and providing "immediate notification" for tenants that it had been done.Refunds were now also happening via the automated service Bond Hub, she said, with more than 6000 done since 1 December, when they were introduced.On 29 June, Tenancy Services moved "more bond tasks… to online self-service through Bond Hub and connected property management software", and removed paper forms from the website altogether. It said this would make bond management "faster, more transparent, and easier for landlords, property managers and tenants".Watson said tenants could now "choose to correspond with us through e-mail, through text, by post and the tenant [phone] number that we're talking about".There has been a rise in calls to Tenancy Services since it implemented a new automated system in June.123RF"So the calls have been much higher than we expected since 29th of June. We did forecast an increase due to the change in the services, however the calls have been higher," she said, confirming that some services were still only available over the phone."The tenant number, yes you have to do it by phone. Now, when we saw the numbers were… higher than expected, within a week we had established a brand new line for that. So tenants can choose that line. The highest wait time for that line for a tenant number has been 10 minutes, and absolutely no calls have been kept on that line."A similar surge in calls to Tenancy Services happened in 2021, when rental law changes were made.Watson said "call capping" was a "fairly common practice across service centres" to stop callers sitting on the phone for a long time then getting cut off when the call centre closed for the day. She said Tenancy Services did use it earlier in the day when call volumes were high, so people were not promised callbacks that could not possibly be done.Watson said she had not heard about anyone failing to receive a promised callback, and would look into it.She said the dedicated 'tenant number' - set up on 6 July - made up about 50 percent of all calls Tenancy Services received, and had a maximum wait time of 10 minutes.She said people should avoid calling on a Monday."Mondays are really busy days. So if you call in the morning or on a Monday, and I heard that Hugo called on a Monday morning, that is the busiest time of our whole week."Paper forms still availableAsked if the new system - which made it harder for tenants to get a paper form they could present directly to their landlords, to ensure a bond was lodged - was favouring landlords, Watson said it "[added] choice for tenants", who could still get a paper bond form posted out if they asked for one."The reason we took the bond form off the website was that we need to drive our landlords to be delivering better service for our customers and for our tenants."Asked if there were landlords who had not registered to use Tenancy Services' new automated software, Watson said many did not unless they needed to - for example, at the end or beginning of a tenancy.Tenancy Services emailed 67,000 landlords asking them to register and had "over 40,000" respond, she said.Watson said the Tenancy Tribunal had become more efficient and reduced timeframes for resolutions.Landlords who contacted Nine to Noon said the Bond Hub system was a "complete mess" and "very difficult if you're not savvy with technology". One said they too were struggling to get through to the call centre, phoning first thing in the morning and already being 60th in the queue.Watson said there had been a "real mixture" of feedback, but Bond Hub was only seven months old and a "new way of doing things"."We are listening to feedback, we have got the ability to do some enhancements, we're engaging with the tenant advocacy network, we've got a tenancy sector collaboration group, which has tenant groups on it, landlord groups, property managers."