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Case Study – Borough Council of Lynn & West Norfolk

Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk achieves £1m efficiency savings – ahead of Gershon

Revenues, Benefits, Customer Services and Office Services

The principal functions of this department are the administration and collection of Council Tax and Business Rates, the administration of Housing and Council Tax Benefit, the provision of a public enquiry and cashiering service and the provision of office services for the Council. The department is the second largest department within the Borough Council

The department has many strengths, particularly the amount of statistics gathered and the performance monitoring undertaken. Most statutory performance indicators are top quartile and staff within the department are aware of how well or not the department is performing through regular publication of those statistics.

The approach taken in Revenues and Benefits was to ask everyone to complete a list of all tasks that they undertook, whether related to a case, a report or was something undertaken on a weekly or monthly basis etc. Some time was then spent discussing these activities, with 49 people in all, to gain the necessary overview understanding of what each role entailed and where the processes fitted in with the other teams. Where a team of people undertook the same process, the Manager of that team was asked to nominate someone to provide the information on behalf of the remainder of the team to minimise the impact on work being processed.

The review built upon existing management controls, and service managers were involved in the design of this system to ensure it fully met their requirements. Regular weekly or fortnightly meetings are now held in a format that ensures every member of the department gets the opportunity to discuss performance and raise issues and problems they experience. Removing those problems and monitoring key indicators will help increase productivity.

Managers within the department worked closely with the consultants during the exercise and contributed many of the suggestions, which ultimately lead to the identification of the posts, which were deleted. This work built upon existing service based analysis and proposals to secure savings from the introduction of new technology. In summary, 9.3FTE posts have been removed saving £210,000 per annum across the service area. The priority of the review was that there should be no adverse effect on service delivery, however, it will be some months before the final impact of these changes can be fully assessed.

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