Case Study

By Andrew Stevens, Head of Revenues & Benefits, Canterbury City Council

In line with most other Local Authorities, Canterbury City Council is always faced with the challenge of trying to reduce its costs whilst providing improved and more responsive services to our customers.

Preparation for the Council's four year budget plan involves all Divisions, including Revenues & Benefits, putting forward detailed proposals to reduce their direct budgets by 10% over a four year period. This isn’t just a paper exercise and, to make sure that Service Heads follow the process correctly and do not just put forward arbitrary savings ideas, we all have to spend time in front of a panel of Councillors explaining exactly how we propose to reduce our budgets in this way without reducing quality of service. Those of you who watch Dragons’ Den can probably imagine the process (no offence intended to our Councillors!)

For years we had been running an in-house cashiers service at our main offices in Canterbury and also in our satellite offices at Herne Bay and Whitstable. Analysis of the service revealed that the numbers of customers using this face to face service were declining each year whilst direct budgets were increasing. This had the effect of increasing unit costs every year. Clearly this needed to be looked at to see if there was a more cost effective way of providing the service.

I was aware that the use of plastic payment cards had been looked at in the past but a decision was made not to proceed with them at the time but I thought it was time to review that decision. We carried out a market analysis to gauge the suppliers who could supply such a service and we carried out a survey of our customers who were using cashiers in the summer of 2007. Interestingly 72% of our customers told us they would like to be given the option of using a payment card to use at their local shop or post office to pay their council bills. Our own research showed us that there were over 70 outlets in the district where people could pay their bills using these cards and we used this fact extensively and very positively in our publicity campaign.

After getting agreement from our corporate Management Team and Councillors we embarked on a tendering exercise under EU procurement rules. This process ended in October 2007 and we chose our preferred supplier which was allpay.net. allpay was asked to supply a payment card solution for Council Tax, Benefit Overpayments, Business Rates, Housing Rents and Garages. We also wanted allpay to arrange a barcode solution for our sundry debt invoices and parking penalty charge notices.

Looking back at the project now, the key to a successful outcome is extensive communication – both internal and external. We started our publicity campaign at least 5 months before cashiers closed by handing out leaflets publicising the closure to every personal caller who visited cashiers. We did several newspaper releases, poster campaigns, had "countdown clocks" at cashiers' desks, special website pages were set up and we arranged many internal briefing sessions for Council departments affected by the change.

We maintained daily contact with allpay during the project and the implementation team were very clear about who was responsible for what and specified the deadlines that had to be met to ensure the project was delivered on time.

We went "live" with our payment card system on 1st March 2008 and we closed our Cashiers function to our customers for the last time at the end of March. Sundry debtors' invoices are now bar-coded and customers are paying these bills at shops and post offices too. We are also in the process of implementing bar-coding on parking penalty charge notices as well.

As a result of these changes we managed to realise over £60k pa gross budget savings. We only received two complaints from members of the public which was reassuring and this fully justified the extensive publicity campaign we undertook. The project ran on time and on budget (how often can people say that with I.T. projects?) thanks to tight project management, a very good internal project team and an extremely effective working relationship with allpay.net.

It is always a challenge to deliver efficiency savings whilst improving the services you offer but we are pleased that we have managed to tick both boxes with this project.

Andrew Stevens
Head of Revenues & Benefits
Canterbury City Council

Andrew.stevens@canterbury.gov.uk