BOROUGH OF POOLE

COMMUNITY SUPPORT AND EDUCATION SCRUTINY COMMITTEE

Tuesday 18 November 2003

REPORT OF HEAD REVENUE AND BENEFITS SERVICE

bEST vALUE PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

FOR

housing benefit and council tax benefit

1PURPOSE AND POLICY CONTEXT

1.1The purpose of this report is to Provide members with a summary of Performance specifically for Housing and Council Tax Benefit (appendix A).

2DECISIONS REQUIRED

2.1Members are asked to note contents of this report.

3 BACKGROUND

3.1The Benefit section deals with

  • Housing and Council Tax Benefit,
  • Concessionary Fares,
  • Student loans and grants, Education grants,
  • Social Services Residential and Fairer Charging assessments.
  • The section consists of 70 members of staff.
  • For our primary benefits, housing benefit and council tax benefit, total expenditure is approximately £22.5 million with a caseload of just under 10,000 claimants.
  • Benefit performance is subject to; Performance Standard annual self-assessment, Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA), several Best Value Indicators and has it own inspectorate known as Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI). The Performance standards and CPA results for 2002/3 are subject to a report to Community Support Overview Group on 25th November 2003.
  • During 2002/3 our performance was not as we had hoped. This was mainly due to staff turnover and sickness and the resulting training issues.
  • These areas have now been addressed with additional staffing resources, a revised salary structure to assist retention and a new training regime. Funding for this has been received from Central Government.
  • As a result we are now seeing a considerable improvement in performance. Performance is monitored on a monthly basis and the Chief Executive receives a quarterly report from the Department of Work and Pensions.
  • It is worth noting that the result of the first part of our 3 yearly satisfaction survey to the question, “Overall satisfaction with service received” 85% reported being satisfied or very satisfied.

John Springett

Head of Revenue and Benefits Service

Contact Officer

Brett Jones

Benefit Manager

Tel 633143

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HOUSING BENEFIT BEST VALUE PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Upper quartile 2001/02 / Average 2001/02 / Lower quartile 2001/02 / Actual 2001/02 / Target 2002/03 / Actual 2002/03
BV76
Security: Whether the LA has a written and pro-active strategy for combating fraud and error which embraces specified initiatives including those sponsored by the Department of Social Security, which is communicated to all staff - yes/no. / YES / YES / YES / YES
BV78a
Average time for processing new claims (days). / 39 / 53 / 70 / 41 / 38 / 46
BV78b
Average time for processing notifications of changes in circumstances (days). / 12 / 18 / 24 / 17 / 14 / 17
BV78c
Percentage of renewal claims processed on time. / 74% / 61% / 51% / 53% / 75% / 53%
BV79a
Percentage of cases for which the calculation of the amount of benefit due was correct on the basis of the information available to the determination, for a sample of cases checked post-determination. / 98% / 95% / 93% / 97.4% / 98% / 94%
BV79b
The percentage of recoverable overpayments (excluding Council Tax Benefit) that were recovered in the year. / 64% / 53% / 43% / 67.3% / 75% / 56%

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