Welcome to the Housing and Council Tax Benefits Service

The Benefits Service celebrated success in September 2006 by achieving Charter Mark for Excellence in Customer Service.  The Inspector visited again in 2007 and confirmed the award.

Charter Mark is a unique national customer service standard that recognises public service organisations that provide excellent customer service.  Its uniqueness stems from its focus on the service actually provided to the customer.

Sedgefield Borough's Benefits Service deals with around 11,500 benefit claimants each year. We want to keep you aware of how we are performing.

The Benefits Service - How We Are Performing

We continue to be amongst the best performing Councils in the country, with excellent customer service, recognised by the Charter Mark award.

We constantly compare ourselves against other Councils using the grading given by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), this is published on their website:
www. dwp.gov.uk/housingbenefits/statistical/
If our performance starts to fall we will tell you and what we are doing about it.

The DWP website has not been updated lately due to the loss of information by Government Agencies.  This has caused a backlog in the collection and collation of information so the DWP website only displays statistics from the first quarter of 2007/08.

Because of the lack of information on the DWP website, you cannot compare us with other councils so we have only included the figures for the two main processing indicators on our table. These figures are collected weekly and are what we supply to the DWP.

From April 2008 the Government is reducing the number of Performance Targets we will be working to.

This will mean our current Performance Indicators will disappear and be replaced by two National Indicators called Right Benefit and Right Time.  Right Benefit will show how accurate we are and Right Time (made up of the two indicators in the table, Days to Process and Changes in Circumstances) will show how long we take.

The Online Claims service is becoming more and more popular with 690 claims carried out in 2007/08 and 562 of those being successful.
We are encouraging customers to use this service by withdrawing the majority of paper claim forms and promoting the use of the surgeries and call backs from Customer Services.  They can complete the online claim form for you in 20 minutes and it will be with an Assessor within an hour. 

We will no longer have Performance Standards to work to or be scored against.  They have been renamed Best Practice Standards and will only be recommended.  They will still be set by the DWP and the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate and will cover the following areas:
· Claims Administration (speed, accuracy, overpayments)
· User Focus (Take-up, information sharing, Equality and Diversity)
· Security (Fraud)
· Resource Management (Value for Money)
For the year 2006/2007 we achieved 96.5% against Performance Standards, which is a rating of Excellent.
Would you like to have your say about Benefits and Council Tax?  We are always looking for volunteers to join our Revenues Focus Group and help improve the service we provide.  If you would like to join please contact the Revenues Improvement Officer on 01388 824057

Our Overpayments Team is working hard to recover overpaid Benefits, this includes customers who have moved from the Borough.  We use County Court Judgments, Attachments of Earnings Orders and Bailiff action.

The Benefits Fraud Team in 2007/08 successfully prosecuted 12 people for Benefit Fraud.  A further 69 Cautions and 5 Administration Penalties were handed out.

If you wish to report a suspected fraud, call the National Anti-Fraud Hotline on free phone 0800 854 440 or use the online Benefit Fraud Reporting Form.

We believe we deal with any complaints fairly and quickly.  In 2007/08 only one formal complaint against us was upheld.
A customer handed in a document and a receipt was given, unfortunately in the process the document was lost.  This rarely happens, but shows the need for customers to ask for a receipt.

We also received 2 compliments and 5 informal complaints.  An informal complaint is where we can deal with a customer's concern at section level without the need for it to be referred on as a formal complaint.

The minutes of the Annual Report on complaints by the Overview and Scrutiny Committee 1 are available on our website.  For a copy of this or any other enquiry please contact:

The Revenue Services Manager or
The Principal Benefits Officer

How the benefits service is made up
Staffing Structure

The above download is in PDF format, to be able to view this document you will need Adobe Acrobat. You can download this software free from Adobe.com.