Council services are under massive pressure and customers that are eligible for multiple entitlements have to apply for each in different ways. This is complicated for the claimant; very inefficient and likely to lead to mistakes. Customers currently have to present the same information and evidence to the council multiple times and this duplication of application and processing is time consuming and unnecessarily costly for the council.
A lot of councils can see a perfect storm coming from a mix of too few staff and too many responsibilities; the cost of living crisis forcing more citizens to reach out for entitlements and an increase in general benefit processing times.
Liberata has over 45 years’ of experience of delivering services to our local authority clients and Unified Assessments is one of those solutions that is clearly delivering consistent results (and we are happy to put you in touch with our satisfied customers). We understand how local authorities work; what the drivers are and what can cause issues as we manage the benefits function on behalf of our clients – we can now leverage that experience and offer support to all other local authorities
What is Covered?
Councils can take all the following or pick a selection of assessments that sit naturally together (e.g. Blue Badges, concessionary travel and disabled facilities grants), but we appreciate that some councils do not have responsibility for all the following and would be happy to work with them on a more bespoke basis.
- Council Tax Support
- Discretionary Housing Payments
- Discretionary Local Crisis Payments
- Housing Benefits
- Financial Assessments
- Blue Badge
- Concessionary Travel
- Disabled Facilities Grants
- Free School Meals
- School Uniform Grants
- Social Care Financial Assessments
The Benefits
- Typically delivers a 15 – 20% saving against existing service costs
- Improved speed of processing – response times are 40% better than delivery by separate teams
- Improved customer experience especially for the more vulnerable citizens
- Automated assessments will generate a further 50% reduction in processing times
- Predicted assessments leads to a 50% reduction in applications for entitlement
