There is a Council Tax collection storm coming. The time to prepare for it is now.

Last January, after Christmas and New Year celebrations were curtailed again, we saw off the peak in Omicron infections without these translating into mass hospitalisations. Finally, we could hope for a gradual return to some sort of normality, including being able to fly off somewhere for a summer holiday. What a difference 6 months makes!

On 3rd February, OFGEM announced the energy price cap would rise by 54% to £1,971 from April. On the same day, the Council Tax Energy Bill Rebate Scheme was announced to sighs of “Here we go again” from Revenues and Benefits staff everywhere. On 26th February, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Fast-forward to today and, for millions of people, a “cost of living crisis” has begun to look more like a potential cost of living catastrophe.

Any further assistance announced in September will probably be targeted so it is likely that millions of working age households, who don’t receive Universal Credit, will be getting less help than they might have hoped for, or none at all, this winter.

Unparalleled times

Two weeks ago, a spokesperson for Lloyds Bank told Times Radio that, whilst they had seen widespread changes in consumer spending patterns, as people ditched TV subscriptions and the like, they had not – as yet – seen any significant increase in missed payments or consumer defaults. Few listeners expect that to continue. The energy price cap will rise significantly in October and then again in January. Average monthly payments could reach £400. This is unprecedented.

So it is already clear that collection of Council Tax this winter - and for the whole of next year - will be a significantly more challenging and complex endeavour than ever before. There is a need to get ready for this now.

But it has probably never been more difficult than it is today to recruit new people. Even the “overflow” agencies are finding it hard to resource demand for their services.

Thankfully, there is another way to increase your available capacity to deal with a much more challenging collection environment.

End-to-end automation in Revenues & Benefits

Automation of processing in Revenues and Benefits provides an alternative, sustainable, rapid, and cost-effective way to free up experienced staff. Councils across the country, large and small, are using Govtech’s webCAPTURE digital process automation service to automate the processing of all in-coming, high volume, day-to-day Council Tax transactions – everything from straight-forward Direct Debits to extremely complex Moves, from Student Discounts and Exemptions to Landlord Notifications. Councils with webCAPTURE free up at least 60% of the staff currently engaged in manually checking, processing, and completing their day-to-day in-coming work. In a small District, it typically frees up 1-2 experienced officers; in the larger Unitaries, it’s 12-16 people.

webCAPTURE is fully hosted; there is no software to buy and no new technology to master. Nobody has to log-in and learn how to use a new system. They simply have to get used to the old system doing much more for them. webCAPTURE is configured by Govtech and ready for testing in 6 weeks.

Full end-to-end automation of processing in Council Tax is not new; councils such as Edinburgh, Sandwell, Kirklees, and North Hertfordshire have been using webCAPTURE for more than 7 years.

We can’t reasonably claim that we can’t see this crisis coming. Consequently, we can’t reasonably argue that we should not make preparations now to deal with what’s coming.

For its part, Govtech is expanding its implementation capacity to support councils who wish to automate Council Tax processing before annual billing. But time is of the essence.

Explore your options

We’ve launched an Automation Forum for Revenues & Benefits. Register to join today and we’ll explain through a series of short webinars exactly what you can automate in your R&B system before next year, what the benefits of that will deliver for you in terms of staff freed up and we’ll show you the Council Tax automation rates being achieved by 40 councils already using webCAPTURE.

The final words on Govtech’s automation probably come best from two customers:

“For more than 8 years, they have delivered end to end automation in a complex Revs & Bens world. We know how hard that can be amid constant change but we don’t need to school them. They understand the business. They are a genuine pleasure to deal with and we can’t envisage a better solution.”

Neil Jamieson, Head of Customer Services, Edinburgh City Council

“Govtech was ‘a company with a mission’. A mission to help us break out of the silo we were in. The Granicus govService platform was already widely deployed but nobody had previously integrated with our core R&B system in the way they were proposing to do, so we had to have confidence in their abilities. I was particularly struck by the focus they placed on 'value'; that what they are doing, the problems they are solving, must generate a return that we can measure. What we found as we went along was that they are experts in the field in which they practice, Revenues and Benefits automation.”

Peter Honeywell, Transformation Architecture Manager, Plymouth City Council