Housing Benefits - Long-term data and improvements in performance.

I’ve helped quite a number of Housing Benefit departments in the last 15 years, including helping Darlington move from 60th in the national league table to the top 10 - where they remain (based on customer end-to-end time).  I also helped Milton Keynes reduce their end-to-end time from 60 days to 20.  Likewise Middlesborough.  And quite a number of others.  And all during a time of cuts.

I’ve been undertaking some Housing Benefit research lately, analysing some of the government data that councils have to lodge - and it’s not been easy!

I trained as a Chartered Accountant, and was soon brought in to the fold of month-ends and year-ends.  Fine, the accountant needs to draw a line in the sand, but back in operations, it’s just another day.  Long term performance in operations requires an understanding of how operations have performed repeatedly over long periods of time.

The Benefits performance data that the government logs are quarterly, and split into geographic region, making it difficult to see performance over time, and difficult to compare similarly sized departments.

I’ve now pulled together all of the long term data into a database to make it easy to compare performance.  This covers:

• 6 years of quarterly data, and
• 379 councils.  

It makes for some interesting analysis - those that do well, and others that seem to struggle - and it enables the real questions to be asked:

• how are some performing well? - what’s special about what they’re doing?
• others are struggling, why is that? - what could they be doing differently?
• why isn’t everyone sharing what they’ve learned to offer great service?

And it’s not because of budget cuts - good performance in systems of the this type is cheaper, because it eliminates the waste work:

http://595or.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/keeping-things-simple.html

http://595or.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/cost-exist-to-be-reduced.html

http://595or.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/does-it-really-take-6-weeks-to-get-my.html

I also have considerable experience of similar improvements in Finance, HR, Payroll, Council Tax, Planning, Housing Repairs, Streetscene and others.  And in the private sector, including IT help desks, billing performance, claims and banking.

Want to know more, drop me a line: matt595@me.com

Matt