London Borough of Waltham Forest has introduced automated online registrations for its housing applications with Home Connections and is now making direct savings £165,000 per year.
Before the introduction of the Home Connections service, Waltham Forest had to manually process countless paper applications, many of which were from applicants it could never hope to house, and frequently accompanied by processing backlogs. The cost of the paper-based process was also hard to justify; SOCITM calculated that it costs public sector companies £8.23 per face-to-face transaction, £3.21 per telephone-based transaction and just 39p per online transaction.
The automated online registration service now gives prospective tenants an instant needs assessment, bedroom eligibility and likely waiting times. The service has also drastically reduced the need for manual processing of applications, resulting in annual cash savings of £165,000.
Nigel Thornton, head of housing solutions, London Borough of Waltham Forest, said, “We introduced Home Connections’ online registration and change of circumstances package and this has completely changed how we process housing applications. We removed the change of circumstances backlog at a stroke and introduced a single process that improved customer satisfaction through instant housing priority calculation and status update.”
Home Connections reported that the cost of the project, which was completed at the end of last year, was a fraction of the permanent ‘cashable’ savings.
