Wokingham

Wokingham District Council’s revenues and benefits team have been working harder than ever this year, bringing significant service improvements that have placed Wokingham council at the forefront of revenues and benefits’ performance in the UK. Their achievements this year include:

* Improving the speed of benefit payments from 46 days to 27.
* Improving the accuracy of benefit payments to 98.8%.
* Meeting challenging Public Service Agreement targets with this performance, to achieve the maximum reward grant from central government (almost £200k).
* Increasing the percentage of council tax collected to 99.1%, making Wokingham District Council the highest performing unitary authority in the country, and generating an additional £300k for council services.
* Collecting an impressive 99.7% of business rates, making Wokingham District Council one of the highest performing unitary authorities for this service in the country.

The Wokingham team also met the 12 key targets in their own service plan, and last week (June 23) they were proud to receive a special award recognising all their achievements from the council chairman Cllr Angus Ross.

The ‘Chairman’s Choice Award’ is the council’s monthly award designed to thank nominated staff for going the extra mile in their job and helping others within the organisation. The award is presented by council chairman Cllr Angus Ross and chief executive Doug Patterson, to staff members nominated by their colleagues.

Corporate head of Wokingham finance Graham Ebers nominated the revenues and benefits team for the award. He said: “I felt it was important that the significance of what has been achieved in revenues and benefits is properly recognized. These achievements are down to the combined work of staff dealing with revenues, benefits, cashiers, customer services and investigations.”

The performance of the service - which includes council tax and business rate collection and the processing of housing and council tax benefit claims – had suffered when it was outsourced to a private sector contractor on August 1 1999. The revenue and benefits service was subsequently brought back in-house in July 2002.

Since then, Wokingham staff have worked very hard to stabilise and improve the service that they took back from the private sector. They quickly cleared the backlog of revenue cases and have gone on to turn the service into one of the best performing revenues and benefits teams among unitary authorities in the country.

Cllr Ross said: “This team has turned the service around and achieved significant milestones in generating income for the Council, whilst ensuring that the money collected is made available quickly to those that need it, and tackling fraud. They are a credit to the organisation and I am delighted to be able to thank them for their work.”

Wokingham Deputy chief executive Paul Turrell, attending the presentation on behalf of Doug Patterson, said: "The revenues and benefits service is of utmost importance to the district. On the revenues side it collects the cash to pay for such vital services as education and care homes, whilst the benefits service helps many of the most needy in our community. Our goal is that the service to our customers meets the highest standards. It is not an easy service and the team deserves all our congratulations for their continuous improvement over the past three years.”

Wokingham District Council