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We’ve helped Wrexham Borough Council to automate the processing of Council Tax Reduction claims for people receiving Universal Credit. By removing around 80% of the manual work – the equivalent of 3 FTEs – it’s delivered benefits worth 25 times the cost so far.

Struggling with high volumes of manual processing

People who claim Universal Credit (UC) are likely to be eligible for help with their Council Tax. The Department for Work & Pensions notifies local authorities each time a UC claim is made where the UC claimant indicates they want to claim CTR. As this data needs transferring into the solution to process any claim for Council Tax Reduction (CTR) it can generate a huge amount of manual work. Some councils can receive several thousand notifications a week.

“We were getting hundreds of DWP notifications every day, which we needed to download and add to our document management system. We were drowning in manual work, and the volume was rising too. That’s why we asked NEC to help us automate the process.”

Matthew Evans, Head of Service – Revenues and Benefits at Wrexham Borough Council

Working with NEC to automating the claims process 

Our ‘UC4CTR’ solution allows councils to automatically create a claim or a change in circumstances for CTR once they receive the UC files from the DWP. It means that citizens don’t need to make a separate claim and councils can process the vast majority without manual review.

For Wrexham, our consultants spent two days helping them to roll out the solution by mapping the DWP data to their own systems and making the process as seamless as possible. This included making it easy for users to review the small number of exceptions that can’t be processed automatically.

Significant return on investment, instantly

When the solution went live, the reduction in manual processing was instant. The team went from managing hundreds of notifications each day to reviewing around seven or eight exceptions.

Our consultants have since worked with Wrexham to fine-tune the solution.

“This solution has saved us about three FTEs. It’s so vital to our team’s performance that two days of consultancy is a small price to pay to check it’s still optimised for our needs.”

Matthew Evans, Head of Service – Revenues and Benefits at Wrexham Borough Council

Matthew believes the solution and consultancy service has delivered benefits worth 25 times the cost by removing manual work, giving the team confidence in the data and freeing up time for more complex tasks.

“NEC’s automation work has paid for itself about 25 times over. Their consultants are incredibly knowledgeable too, which means you can see a huge benefit in a really short space of time.”