Runnymede Borough Council has used NEC Revenues & Benefits for many years. Applications for Discretionary Housing Payments had been paper-based until 2020, when the council created some web forms to help manage growing demand.

However, the forms had some limitations, as Benefits Manager Ed Bowen explains:

“Our previous forms didn’t let people save their application, add attachments or provide enough space for much detail. We’d need to get in contact with the citizen and ask them to send attachments, then match them to the right case. It wasn’t great for us or for them.”

Reporting could be difficult too. The government returns require detailed information to be submitted on the reasons for the claim, but this was hard to collate.

Moving to Citizen Access

Runnymede moved to our online self-service platform, Citizen Access, going live with Landlords in 2021 and then added Citizen Access – Benefits. Having seen good results, they added Discretionary Housing Payments in April 2023.

Citizen Access – Discretionary Housing Payments (CA-DHP) is designed to make the end to end process easier for customers and staff. Customers can upload attachments with their application and save it part way through. There’s no character limit to worry about and the help text with each field can be customised to meet their exact needs.

Staff don’t need to manually enter data, as the information on each claim goes straight into NEC Revenues and Benefits. Prioritisation is easier too, because CA-DHP ranks the answers to set questions to identify who may need help sooner. Before, staff would have to read the detail of each claim to understand people’s needs.

Unlike with their previous forms, the council no longer receives contact about queries or errors, and the local Citizen Advice agents have found it easy to help their customers too.

Simpler Reporting

Ed says that reporting is also much quicker, because CA-DHP shows a clear picture of where the demand is coming from:

“To prepare our management returns, we’re just pressing a few buttons. Before, it was really hard to pull everything together.”

Once the forms were set up, the go-live process was smooth. And the team is now able to create and amend questions themselves, helping them to keep on top of customer needs.