Effective administration of housing and council tax benefits impacts on both the financial position of councils, as well as financial support to some of their most vulnerable members of the community. It ensures an increase in revenue collection and a minimisation of subsidy loss, while being responsive and supportive to citizens. Efficient service delivery also ensures a focus on continuous improvement to meet central government’s CPA and Gershon agendas.
Managing housing and council tax benefits is resource intensive and requires keeping up to date with DWP legislation, streamlining systems to ensure efficient claims processes, and continuous improvements to ensure accessibility and outreach to citizens.
How Capita can help
Capita works with over 100 local authorities in the provision of benefits services, varying from training, consultancy, back-office processing to the complete management and delivery of the service. We process over 250,000 claims per annum and our experience ensures that we tailor our process to each council’s needs providing both onsite support to council staff, offsite processing of claims and customer contact centre support.
Our range of services include:
- Assessment of housing and council tax benefit claims (onsite and off-site)
- Customer services for over 200,000 personal callers and around 1.6 million telephone enquiries per annum
- Paying out over £660 million in housing benefits and council tax benefits
- Assessment of free school meals, clothing grants and student grants
- Community outreach and fraud visits
- Specialist fraud and overpayment recovery teams
- Centralised systems, training and policy support
- Completion of subsidy returns, DWP statistical returns and CPA self-assessments.