The relationship between the people of Hackney and their local authority has been transformed by allowing people to interact with council as quickly, conveniently and easily as possible.
IPSOS MoRI reports a massive leap in resident satisfaction towards services provided by the London Borough of Hackney (LBH) and a strong positive perception of how taxpayers money is being spent. This maybe in part how the council is servicing its resident via new technologies.
Improvements have been made possible due to LBH’s staff having access to council-wide up-to-date accurate information about their citizens. The LBH’s Citizen Index, a trusted and secure central repository of citizen information, provides a single searchable source of information across Revenues and Benefits, CRM, Housing, Parking and the National Land and Property Gazetteer.
Access to the right data at the right time has driven down costs including a significant improvement in call handling times. Citizen’s details do not need to be re-entered, with additions and edits to information being updated in seconds and immediately available to other council departments via web services.
Moving services online is cutting down costs, for example verification of parking applications and permits. SOCITM (Society of IT Management) source estimates the cost savings moving from for face to face to online transactions is a 95% reduction from £7.32 to £0.32.
Opportunities for continual improvement created by the Citizen Index include identifying & removing 10,000 duplicate individuals ; exposing households fraudulently claiming single persons benefit (Council Tax) and tracking down individuals to recover unpaid debts.
The Citizens Index is used as the trusted source for citizen verification where people and their addresses require validation in order to inform legal proceedings; ASBO and noise abatement orders and as the authentication interface within LBH’s Troubled Families initiative and is also assisting in the Individual Electoral Register (IER project).
LBH have already implemented SOCiTM award winning Citizen Index model to build the Childrens and Young Peoples Index for child protection and early intervention. Future plans include continuing to build on it’s success to create a Business Index, to increase revenues by identifying waste contracts and unreported non-domestic rates accounts.
The My Hackney portal, will enable citizens to self-serve by using the Citizen Index as a cross reference integrating data across different services into a single portal.
“ the rewards and benefits in efficiency, citizen satisfaction and improved services far outweigh the challenges of maintaining a citizen index ”
Keith Benjamin, Master Data Technical Manager, London Borough of Hackney
Solution Partners
The solution partners selected to create the Citizen Index included Infoshare Limited supplying their ClearCore solution and Oxford Computer Consultants Ltd as the integration partner. OCC and Infoshare have worked closely together since 2008.
Infoshare Ltd has over 15 years’ experience of successfully supplying proprietary Data Quality Software to solve mission critical matching in conjunction with the Police and Child Support Agencies.
Infoshare’s ClearCore software has been the data quality and matching engine behind the trail blazer authorities who established information sharing partnerships for child protection objectives since 2003, Sheffield Safety Net+ and the East Sussex Child Index being examples of high profile and long established projects.
Typical projects will include identifying troubled families; vulnerable citizens; underpinning CRM applications; identifying internal and external fraud; establishing children needing support and intervention and enabling effective multi-agency coordination.
OCC and Infoshare have been successfully partnering since 2008.
For further information please contact:
Richard Onslow richard.onslow@infoshare-is.com
Oxford Computer Consultants Ltd specialise in delivering and supporting software for Local Authorities.
OCC are well known for social care products such as Controcc, SPOCC and PSOCC are in the top ten leading suppliers of social care applications in a recent report by Kable
“Smarter social services – Applications for informed care delivery”
OCC are on government frameworks such as gCloud and the Digital Services Framework. They are ISO28001 accredited for handling sensitive data and through their 25 years have built up extensive experience in systems integration and data migration in Local Authority settings.