A YEAR TO FEEL PROUD ABOUT
Without a doubt, 2022 was a challenging year for the UK. The pandemic, that seemed to have lasted forever, was slowly coming to an end and there was hope that everything might return to normal. But unforeseen events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, had a shocking impact on the global economy and, consequently, on everyone's day-to-day life. Energy costs reached previously unheard-of heights and exacerbated inflation.
The national government introduced measures to support every household but who did they ask to deliver that support? You, Local Authorities! And how you stepped up to the plate! You delivered, and you delivered spectacularly. Accepting the challenges, inventing the solutions and helping your citizens in ways that were never dreamt of in your business plans for 2022.
Govtech too were proud to have stood beside so many of our Local Authority customers, designing the solutions and managing the end delivery. We want to thank those customers who placed their trust in Govtech to work in true and deep partnership to meet these unprecedented demands together.
COUNCIL TAX ENERGY REBATE
The Council Tax Energy Rebate Scheme was introduced and dominated the first half of the year. Local government, already overstretched by constant demands placed upon them, were put under a great deal of additional pressure. They simply didn’t have the resource available to administer tens of thousands of £150 rebate payments in such a short timescale.
Govtech was able to help some of the authorities to fully automate these payments thanks to our expertise in data validation and automation of high-volume transactional processing. We worked with our customers to identify what support they needed, and together, we developed a solution which met that requirement. Our brand-new Council Tax Energy Rebate (CTER) scheme was developed in just 4 weeks - a fully automated end-to-end service – from application, through verification, to payment
When the Scheme concluded in October, we had processed around 650k cases and automated £100 million in payments with a ‘completely automated’ rate of 99%.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
On the back of CTER we developed our Discretionary Payment Service which enables citizens to apply for grants with councils approving or rejecting (the decision is made by officers) applications and making payments. Everything before and after the officer’s decision is automated.
We also developed other new solutions and enhanced existing services:
- We created a New Discount and Exemption form, a single, highly intuitive web form which replaces 20-30 other, disparate application forms and makes it much easier for citizens to obtain the help that they need.
- We fully automated processing of Retail Rate Relief applications in Scotland.
- We now automatically process almost every type of household move and we've also added house purchases/sales to that list where the liable person isn't resident.
- For Landlord notifications we now collect contact and billing information.
- In Benefits, we released our new HB/CTR (The Legacy Housing Benefits and Council Tax Reduction) and Change In Circumstances forms. Designed in collaboration with our customers and still delivering the same full integration into the Benefits system using our eCAPTURE service.
- For Universal Credit LCTR and HBSTOP processing we flagged more items that require officer intervention so they can focus on those and maximise automation on everything else. And we also further enhanced our PDF renditions to make things much easier for Assessors.
QUARTERLY CUSTOMERS REPORTS
Quarterly Customer Reports, which we introduced in October to keep our customers informed of their automation performance, sparked some friendly competition among them to rise to the top of the Moves Automation Leader board.
We were delighted to see the enthusiasm with which our customers greeted the publication of their fantastic automation levels, as well as their desire to increase them even further.
GROWING THE GOVTECH FAMILY
We take great pride in working with so many local authorities, both large and small, across the country who use Govtech’s eCAPTURE, webCAPTURE and UCDS digital process automation services to automate the processing of all in-coming high volume daily transactions.
We’re fortunate to have such a loyal and devoted customer base and we are delighted whenever one of them chooses to remain a part of the Govtech family. We’d like to say a special thank you to the following councils, who recommitted to Govtech for the long term and renewed their contracts in 2022:
| Aberdeenshire Council | Wakefield Council | |
| Bassetlaw District Council | Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council | |
| Bedford Borough Council | Dumfries & Galloway Council | |
| Hambleton District Council | Salford City Council | |
| Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council | Perth & Kinross Council | |
| Harrogate Borough Council | North Ayrshire Council | |
| North Hertfordshire District Council | Reigate & Banstead Borough Council | |
| Milton Keynes Council | South Ayrshire Council | |
| West Northamptonshire Council |
We also welcomed back Wolverhampton City Council, who re-adopted the full suite of Govtech digital process automation services in Revenues & Benefits. Wolverhampton has been a Govtech customer for a continuous period of over 10 years and we’re thrilled to welcome them back as webCAPTURE & eCAPTURE users. Read more in our 'Returning to the premiership: City of Wolverhampton Council has reinstated webCAPTURE and eCAPTURE' blog.
Along with so many long-standing customers, we welcomed new ones: Leeds City Council, the country’s second-largest local authority and our second Capita site, chose Govtech to provide end-to-end automation services in Revenues. This is another important partnership for Govtech as it demonstrates that there is a proven, alternative, end-to-end automation solution for Capita R&B users that delivers the vital productivity and customer service benefits and savings that councils need to better target the increasingly limited resources that they have on complex cases.
We are extremely privileged to work with such fantastic customers. Forming deep and mutually beneficial partnerships is intrinsic to what we do, which is to deliver guaranteed outcomes in digital process automation.
AUTOMATION FORUM WEBINARS
We are on a mission to help councils understand what full, end-to-end automation is and what levels of automation can be achieved. It’s time to increase automation expectations as we believe that automation has frequently been oversold and underdelivered to councils. That is one reason why we offer automation as a service with guaranteed outcomes.
So, in the Autumn we hosted a series of webinars to help to raise aspirations. We explained exactly what can be automated in R&B systems, what the benefits are in terms of staff freed up and we showed the Council Tax automation rates being achieved by 40+ councils already using webCAPTURE.
Read more in our ‘Automation your friend not foe’ blog or get in touch to ask for the webinars recordings.
STATS
Overall, in 2022 we automated the processing of just under 3 million individual Council Tax, Business Rates and Benefits forms as well as pre-assessing millions of ATLAS LCTR Notifications. These resulted in over 30 million automated interactions with back-office R&B systems, with around 80% of all transactions fully completed in accordance with each customer's business rules.
GOVTECH GROWS
Internally, the Govtech family has also grown in 2022; we've welcomed five new members of staff to ensure we're prepared for the growing customer base. We have also celebrated a Govtech wedding and welcomed the cutest new addition to the Govtech family, baby Sebastian, who was born in November.
What’s on the horizon for Govtech
We’ve signed up to participate at the IRRV Spring Conference in Leeds, 16 – 17th May ’23 – if you’re going, please come to say hello; we’ll be at stand 16. And we’ve confirmed our attendance once again at the IRRV Annual Conference in Telford from 4th to the 6th of October ’23 – we’ll be at stand 42 this time, so come and speak about automation with us! However, if you have a pressing question, then simply get in touch.
It’s safe to say that it’s been an eventful year but we’ve enjoyed the challenges and most of all, working with our customers. One of our objectives is to make every customer an advocate for automation and a reference site. Your success is our success!
