(a)

this report was in response to the recommendations agreed at the Support Services Task and Finish Group in February 2012 which reviewed the impact of the restructure in Revenues and Benefits, Customer Services and the Transaction Centre (previously incomes and creditors);

(b)

the Revenues and Benefits service over the past 12 months had been through huge change including a restructure, with the aim of saving £1m, and a major increase in service demands;

(c)

recent CIPFA 2012 benchmarking information showed that the service was now one of the most cost efficient authorities. Performance had also improved with the time taken to process new claims reduced from 30 to 23 days (which is now on a par with council average);

(d)

the service acknowledged that there was still work to do in further reducing processing times, although it was strongly felt that the service was heading in the right direction;

(e)

the restructure, since its implementation in November 2011, had been successful, although there were still many changes still to be implemented, many of which were suggested improvements from staff.

(f)

the interim staff survey had not been completed, however, the management were heavily engaged in staff relations throughout the service by way of measures including hot-desking and formal staff consultations;

(g)

in attempting to enable a single and central customer service location the service had been engaged with libraries and were exploring many customer access points;

(h)

the Strategic Manager role, identified in recommendation 10, was due to be re-evaluated along with all other manager posts within the FETA departments and it was hoped that if this post was demonstrated to have been under-valued then the pay scale would be backdated;

(i)

in order to deal with the impending changes to Welfare Reform the department were currently consulting the public on Council Tax Support and working with voluntary organisations to raise awareness of this issue. Internally, the department had been improving staff training, providing updates and guidance on welfare reform, communicating with staff on and investing in new technologies;

(j)

online transactions were an important tool for the department, however, it was acknowledged that there needed to be viable alternatives for transactions to assist those customers who were not IT literate;

(k)

the impact on the service during school holidays had been reduced by spreading term-time workers across many different teams;

(l)

Cabinet were going to receive a monthly update on the Revenues and Benefits Service and if the panel felt that it would assist this information could be shared;

(m)

the service had to deal with a significant increase in benefit applications but now operated with a nil backlog system on new applications, compared to the 2600 backlog cases when the restructure was implemented;

(n)

processing times for changes in circumstances have been affected by an issue with downloading ATLAS files from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), this was currently operating as a backlog but was being cleared as a priority;

(o)

there was now a clear distinction between Grade D and Grade E posts;

(p)

the service was confident about recovering overpayments and now worked out of hours to assist customers in making payments and offering advice; 

(q)

uncollected debt was sometimes written off but the service had clear policies and procedures for dealing with this issue. In recent years the Council had been very successful in recovering Council Tax and NNDR debts.

(1)

the results of the interim staff survey will be submitted to the panel at its next meeting on 19 November 2012;

(2)

Dave Saunders would email all panel members an update of work undertaken on enabling a single and central customer services location;

(3)

Malcolm Coe, would email all panel members an analysis on the make-up of the service structure including numbers of term-time workers, with percentages against the full-time employed service;

(4)

the monthly Revenues and Benefits update report, submitted to Cabinet, would be included on the agenda for all Support Services Overview and Scrutiny panel meetings;

(5)

Malcolm Coe, would email all panel members a full analysis on overpayments made by the council, including figures on how much is written off. In addition the figure of 98 per cent collection of Council Tax is to be provided as a monetary figure.