Benefits management and payment

Delivering administrative support for benefits management

With financial pressures and national welfare a priority, we offer quality and technology-enabled solutions, focused on improving the quality of services for customers – from reducing the time to process claims, to minimising fraud, error and overpayments. Our digital platforms mean that services are more accessible for customers, and are specifically designed for today’s modern community.

We handle all administration functions from the initial point of contact and claim assessment, through to overpayment recovery and appeals. We can also train your employees, via our learning and development programmes, to be better equipped to provide digital services to the community.

“To see continued improvements year on year since we have worked with Capita is really pleasing. These are the best ever processing rates for benefits which gives us the confidence we are serving those most vulnerable in our borough in the most efficient way, to best avoid any associated homelessness issues that can arise through delay of benefit payments.” Mark Underwood, Head of Exchequer Services at London Borough of Bexley

Innovative solutions that work

We have a range of service delivery models and offer a number of different partnership options to meet your priorities.

Whether it’s a fully managed service, short-term access to additional capacity and resilience, or working alongside your in-house teams, our housing benefit and council tax support services offer a combination of value for money, best practice processes, online solutions and highly skilled people.

How we deliver our housing benefit and council tax services

Digital housing benefit services and process redesign

By combining effective digital software, supported by new processes and customer engagement, we can help you run a successful digital housing benefit service that lowers both costs and demand-related customer enquiries.

We provide:

integrated software, citizen portals, self-checks and automated processes – enabling you to offer a digital service, available via the web or mobile, and be more in tune with the way residents live their lives
new customer contract processes – to maximise the use of more cost-effective channels, such as websites, online forms, email and more effective IVR technology
customer communications – including local marketing campaigns to increase uptake of the online service and give additional support to vulnerable customers
digital service design – working alongside your customer services teams to evaluate your digital maturity and make recommendations to improve your processes, implement technology or maximise online uptake.

Fully managed service

Our fully-managed housing benefits service gives you straightforward access to the wide range of resources and services we can provide. They are relatively quick and simple to set up. The employees involved either transfer their employment to us under TUPE terms; or are seconded to us for the duration of the contract.

We are one of the UK’s most experienced companies in this kind of arrangement – some 70% of our employees have transferred under a service agreement.

Additional capacity

We provide effective, reliable and on-demand access to additional expert resource and capacity to support your in-house revenues and benefits processing during peaks in demand, specific projects or during workforce shortages.

We already provide over 14,000 hours of resilience services every month to local councils, supporting the delivery of housing benefits, council tax and national domestic rates (NDR) administration.

Our revenue and benefits resilience service includes access to fully trained employees, a dedicated contract management team and expert system knowledge insight, as well as forecasting to predict peaks in demand.

Whether it’s on a one-off or longer-term basis, this flexible service can reduce backlogs, lower costs, and we guarantee results every step of the way.

Working alongside your organisation

If you want to deliver an outcome, but with a shorter term and flexible arrangement, we can deploy key talent and resources from within Capita to work with you as part of an integrated team. Here we don’t run your operation, or service, but help you to drive changes and to implement ways of working that will improve the way you work. We’re flexible around the commercial arrangements too; we often operate on a contingency model, with our fees based on our clients’ success – and can offer guarantees around delivering those outcomes.