Mersey mission saves council from backlogs

Liverpool Direct, the company established to improve public services for Liverpool City Council, has used IT systems to clear a backlog of 50,000 cases in its revenues and benefits service.

Jointly owned by the council and BT, Liverpool Direct has installed a document scanning and storage system to manage 200,000 council tax accounts and 78,000 benefit cases.

David McElhinney, Liverpool Direct’s chief executive, says that before the organisation started work in 2001, the city council revenue and benefits service was one of the poorest performers in the country and had one of the highest tax rates.

‘It was essential to the cash flow of the city council that revenues and benefits be managed effectively. At the time, they weren’t,’ said McElhinney.

‘People would be queueing up for two or three hours just to pay their council tax.’

Inefficiencies were such that benefit determinations were running at 143 days.

Part of the reason for the delay was that all Liverpool’s revenues and benefits records were stored on paper, in files that took up three full floors of a large city centre office, says McElhinney.

‘Even with big changes to infrastructure we couldn’t affect the level of delay very much, and we realised we needed an IT system with document imaging and a workflow that would deal with case management,’ he said.

A single central mail room was created to feed documents to a scanning room, where the paper was copied into Liverpool Direct’s computer system.

At peak level, the Kodak scanners were handling up to five million documents a year, says Martin Jungnitz, Liverpool Direct’s development manager.

‘As we have got more on top of dealing with these documents, that has gone down to about 3.5 million,’ he said.

The scanned documents feed into Liverpool Direct’s case management system, where they are sorted using barcodes printed on the forms. This has completely eliminated the time taken up in searching for paper files.

‘The case backlog is now completely cleared, and waiting times for processing benefits applications are down to 33 days, which has taken Liverpool from the bottom quarter of councils to the top for revenues and benefits work. We aim to reduce that processing time next year to just 26 days,’ said McElhinney.

‘Liverpool Direct now plans to take the lessons learned from its revenues and benefits project to areas where the council deals with high volumes of paper.

‘Social care in Liverpool has enormous problems with file management, integrity of paper and integrity of information, as do council procurement and legal services,’ said McElhinney.

‘We can go to those departments and take the IT systems and workflow we have established, and really help them to be much more efficient.’

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Liverpool Direct

• A document scanning and management system was used to reduce massive administrative backlogs.
• Delays in benefits processing were reduced from 143 days to 33.
• The system now processes 3.5 million documents per year.