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Planning For Universal Credit With QPredict

Last Edited: 14th Oct 2015

Steve Taylor outlines how a strategic partnership between the IRRV, Erewash Borough Council and QPredict has developed a service that will help Local Authorities manage the migration of cases to Universal Credit.

Background

 

With the active migration phase of Universal Credit approaching, Local Authorities are under increasing pressure to identify exactly how this changing pattern in workloads will affect their Housing Benefits and Revenues departments.  As the detailed DWP migration path is formed, Councils need to have the tools in place to model the potential changes in their workforce against these emerging plans. 

This is an extremely complex situation with the resultant shift in claims (through new universal credit claims, or a natural or managed migration of claimants) combining with other operational issues such as additional Council Tax collection problems and on-going technological and process changes (e.g. web based transactions, shared services, funding pressures, etc.)

Problems Faced

Erewash, like many Local Authorities, recognised that it will be a challenging process to forecast how these changes might affect them, and were concerned that the existing demands on Council resources meant they would not have the capacity to look at these issues in the detail required.  They also realised that they needed to not only evaluate the impact of these changes in detail but provide an audit trail of how decisions were being made. 

As a Council that operates a combined benefits section, there were concerns at national reports detailing the complete closure of benefit sections; reductions of over 50% in staffing levels; and TUPE to DWP of benefits staff.  They felt that they needed a way to demonstrate the exact resource requirements of the retained processes rather than allowing an assumption that did not recognise that where a single department processed both CT and HB benefits the second benefit was processed at marginal additional effort and cost.

Approach Taken

QPredict Resource Modelling is already operational across a range of service areas in a number of Councils.  With its practitioner support and intuitive web based solution it can provide a baseline of an organisation’s operational, administrative and management activities in terms of volumes, times taken, cost and other key metrics.  This baseline is then adapted, through either simple or complex ‘what if’ scenarios (modelled in minutes), to offer an unrivalled ability to capture and understand the impact of changes on staffing and associated costs. 

 

 

During the initial work with the Council, the IRRV became aware of the work being done and identified that this would be beneficial to all local authorities affected by Universal Credit.  Q2, Erewash Borough Council and the IRRV have therefore worked in partnership to develop a standard approach to the problem. 

Erewash Borough Council‘s solution was designed around a baseline model that reflects their current operational activities and resource requirements.  The model was built through an inclusive approach with team members and in a measurable and transparent way.  Through the utilisation of standard reports, sampling and extrapolating, the Council were able to provide all the information that was required to model the baseline within a very short timescale.

Phillip Sudlow, Benefits Manager said “We thought it was going to take a lot longer than it actually did - it only took us a couple of days to get all the information together”.

Very quickly from the baseline data they were able to identify efficiencies and make changes to their organisational way of doing things, providing immediate benefits from the identification and better utilisation of resources and the re-allocation of tasks to other areas.

John Drewett, Exchequer Services Manager said “Our initial use of QPredict has already identified improvements to be gained by placing trained benefit assessors in front line customer contact to provide the capacity to deal with as much as possible while the customer was still present.  The QPredict model enabled us to see where we had a miss-match of resources and transfer sufficient resources to cover the gaps, whilst being able to reduce the overall FTE count.  We were also able to see where we were “spending” effort and resources, and question the relevance and importance of the aims we set

Once the current situation was modelled and verified, a series of future scenarios were developed throughout the anticipated migration period.  These scenarios took very little time to create and adapt (a few minutes) and not only took into account Universal Credit requirements but other changing operational requirements including fluctuating enquiry levels.  They could also be easily used to incorporate changes such as shared services; self-service processing, etc. as and when these are considered in the future. 

The scenarios have helped the Council to model a variety of operational setups, considering not only how the work is carried out, but ensuring confidence in the ability to sustain the service and providing information to counter arbitrary cuts.  It has enabled Erewash to plan and prepare for the future challenges, helping to manage the uncertainty during this period of rapid change.  Managers of the department now have increased confidence in the staffing levels required, greatly improving the outcome and mediation with affected stakeholders and providing the opportunity to share the information with all levels of staff, Members and Directors.  Using QPredict the Council can now remodel any changes that the DWP may make in the future in a matter of minutes.

John Drewett, Exchequer Services Manager said “The advantage from a management (and accountants) viewpoint is that we now have transparency on workload, staff resources and cost, and can prioritise effort and predict consequences instantly. Modelling the impact of the current welfare reforms and universal credit we have identified that we are currently operating with less staff than we need for the changes that we are faced with, but more importantly we have the evidence to prove this to Directors and Members

The Council have found that through utilising QPredict not only have all of their requirements been met but the anticipated timescales required to provide this information have been dramatically reduced.  Erewash Borough Council now have access to a powerful tool for further scenario modelling within their Revenues and Benefits departments, as well as the refinement and development of their existing models for future process improvement.

 

 

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