Ten Scottish councils have joined forces to set up a shared
service to measure the performance of their housing benefit
systems.
The councils spent a total of £1.5m on a hosted service from
Aspiren. The system sends electronic regulatory returns to the
Department for Work and Pensions, integrates with councils'
third-party housing benefit systems and streamlines business
processes.
Unlike other attempts to set up shared service centres in local
government, Aspiren's Aspireview system is owned equally by all the
councils that use it.
Nigel Watson, chief technology officer at Aspiren, said, "The big
lesson we learned [from previous deployments] is that if you drive
it from one large authority, you are going to run into problems
around ownership and buy-in."
Watson cited Aspireview's ability to bypass the councils' IT
departments as one of the reasons why the implementation had taken
just five months from the signing of the contract. "We do not need
to go near the council IT department to get all of this
implemented," he said.
When the contract was signed, all 10 councils met with the
Department for Work and Pensions and local government watchdog
Audit Scotland to agree what the performance management system
would measure.
Colin Shand, East Lothian Council's head of finance and IT, said
the time taken to process housing-benefit applications has fallen
from 100 to 30 days since the council began using the system. "Our
target is to get it down to 20 days," he said.
The system has also enabled the councils to abandon their
paper-based monthly and quarterly statutory returns to the
Department for Work and Pensions. "It used to take two or three
days every month or quarter," Shand said. "Now we will have a look
over it in one morning."