The City Of Edinburgh Council - Housing and Council Tax Online System
The City Of Edinburgh Council - Housing and Council Tax Online System
Social Inclusion through Simple, Efficient Online Services
The Housing Benefits Online (HBOL) application makes benefits simpler and quicker both for citizens to apply for and local authorities to manage. The result is a greatly improved service that enables local authorities to efficiently deliver benefits in a timely manner to those that need them. EzGov Europe (EzGov) is now in a position to roll out the application to any local authority in the UK.
CASE IN POINT : Benefits Online, City of Edinburgh Council
Each year local authorities receive tens of thousands of new or updated applications for council tax and housing benefits. Due to the complex and lengthy nature of the claims, many claimants have difficulty completing or updating their claims using the paper-based claims forms. A large proportion seek further help from council staff, their Registered Social Landlord or third party advisors (such as the Citizen’s Advice Bureau) in order to complete the forms.
Despite this, a large proportion of the forms returned to local authorities are incomplete or
inaccurate, and a claim cannot be processed until this is corrected, which can take days or weeks.
This can result in:
- unnecessary hardship for claimants waiting to receive benefits;
- a negative impact on a local authority’s performance against government claim processing time and payment accuracy targets;
- an increased burden on council staff (particularly revenue and benefits officers who are frequently a scarce resource).
These problems are compounded by the fact that the details of any household’s claim often changes frequently, with the result that ‘change of circumstances’ claims form up to 80% of the total number of claims submitted to councils.
The City of Edinburgh Council decided to tackle this problem as part of their ‘Smart City’ initiative. In association with BT, the council chose EzGov to develop an online benefits service. Their decision was based on the fact that EzGov have a track record of successfully delivering online applications for local and central government where the citizen is at the heart of the design. EzGov was additionally able to demonstrate unrivalled take-up of those applications, with millions of submissions to government handled every year by EzGov solutions.
EzGov developed and implemented the solution in collaboration with its partners, BT and Comino, and with frequent input from revenue and benefits officers, contact centre staff and Citizen’s Advice Bureaux staff. The result is an online service which:
- calculates which benefits the claimant is eligible for and the amount to which they are entitled;
- dramatically reduces the length and complexity of claims for the claimant;
- passes the claim directly through to the Comino document management system;
- enables the citizen to save partially completed forms;
- allows the claimant to check the status of their claim online.
EzGov achieve this using a number of innovative design features, including:
- determining which sections of the claim form are relevant to the claimant and then actively guiding them through those sections;
- pre-populating the claim form using data gathered from eligibility questions;
- validating input at every stage of the process, ensuring that it is both correct and complete;
- compiling a personalised list of the documents that the claimant will need to send to the council in support of their claim;
- acting as a single source of information regarding housing and council tax benefits.
The service can be used by claimants, contact centre staff and third parties, as well as by mobile revenue and benefits officers.
Accessibility
HBOL is a ‘thin-client’ application that can be accessed by any web-browser connected to the Internet, removing the need to install software or download time-consuming plug-ins. It conforms to W3C accessibility guidelines, making it accessible to the widest possible audience, including visually impaired citizens.
User-friendliness
The overarching priority when designing the application was to ensure that it was easy to use to the point where it was able to replace the need for face-to-face meetings with contact centre staff, housing associations, agents and other supporting parties. Through features such as intelligent navigation, user input validation, the use of question and answer screens that guide the user through their claim and context sensitive help and advice available as and when the claimant needs it the application acts as an online benefits advisor. This ensures that the claim process is as user-friendly as possible.
Improved Efficiency
By giving the claimant personalised advice about their claim and how they should complete it, ensuring that a claim has been completed correctly before it is submitted, and submitting the claim directly into the City of Edinburgh council’s Comino EDM workflow system, the application dramatically increases the speed of a claim from end to end as well as the amount of time required from teams that support the claims process. This results in significant cost savings and increased performance by local authorities against government targets.
City of Edinburgh Council have found that the application’s ability to streamline the process by which an updated ‘change of circumstance’ claim is made has had a particularly big impact on the efficiency of the revenue benefits service that they can offer to citizens.
Security
All data is confidential and is visible only to the claimant until submission takes place. All data is kept for future reference and is available online to the claimant for 32 days. HBOL provides a level of security on a par with online banking.
Designed with Take-up in Mind
The immediate accessibility of the service means that it is easy for claimants to start using it, whilst its user-friendly nature means that those who have used it once will invariably use it again. HBOL has been designed with performance and scalability in mind, can immediately handle a significant fraction of those submitting new or updated claims, and scale up to handle more as the service gains in popularity.
Easy to Maintain
HBOL is able to quickly adapt to the frequent legislative changes that are made to the Housing and Council Tax Benefits rules year on year, even if they affect the rules which calculate the claimant’s eligibility for benefits and the amount to which they are entitled. This ensures that the application is always accurate and up-to-date.
“This will revolutionise the application process.” says Mike Peterson, Head of Revenues and Benefits. “The whole paper application can be daunting for many people. With the online version, not only will people have to answer the questions which are directly relevant to their circumstances but they will get an idea straightaway of how much benefit they may get.”
Housing Benefits Online can be accessed from the City of Edinburgh Council’s website www.edinburgh.gov.uk
