Local government watchdog, the Audit Commission, has rated Islington Council's housing benefit service as a four star 'excellent service'. This year's rating puts it amongst the best in the country.
Cllr Marisha Ray, Executive Member for Performance and Community Safety, Islington Council said: "It took steely determination and vision to bring about this magnificent transformation to the service in just three years.
"We now deal with 94 per cent of claims in 14 days, answer over 90 per cent of telephone calls within 20 seconds and the numbers of complaints have plummeted.
"While we are delighted to be rated as excellent, we remain ambitious for further improvements and are excited about our future plans for doing this.
"For example, we are both expanding our Manchester-based service centre, and will also do more "on the spot" processing, especially in customers' homes. We have already made progress with this. Our officers visit vulnerable people at home and help them to claim benefits -we will be extending this service to people of all ages.
"We are also going to make even more housing benefit transactions possible on our website so even fewer customers will have to visit our offices or telephone us."
The most significant change to the service came in December 2005, when difficulties retaining staff in London was overcome by opening an office in Greater Manchester. Islington Council was the first in the country to set up this kind of a remote benefits service to over come staff shortages. The Audit Commission commended it for this innovation.
Islington Council's Manchester based staff use the same systems as staff in London and follow the same policies and procedures. Initially, 19 people were employed but this has recently increased to 25.
Other problems with the service were identified quickly and systematically dealt with one by one. Agency staff were replaced with permanent staff and they underwent extensive training in 2004.
Communication with customers was targeted for improvements. Drastic improvements were made after the council set up a call centre to make responding to complaints a top priority. This helped reduce the number of complaints from 3,000 a year to 300.
Lorraine Constantinou, Brook Park Tenants' Co-op, who manages 115 properties in Archway, reflected on her earlier relationship with Housing Benefits compared to now. She said: "Today I hardly have any contact with housing benefits and that's a good thing. I am happier and my tenants are happier because we get responses to queries and problems are resolved so quickly - I am only dealing with two queries at the moment.
"This is a total contrast to my past relationship with Housing Benefit. They were an absolute nightmare to deal with. I could not do my job properly because I spent so many hours every day on the phone trying to solve housing benefit problems for my tenants. In the end I had to get a hands free head set because of the amount of time I sent on the phone."
Brenda Windsor, who also manages 103 properties for Hollbrook Co-op, also in Archway, said: "I agree with every word Lorraine says. When I started working here six years ago, things were so different from now. I think things improved a lot when we started meeting housing benefit officers regularly at meetings to talk through the problems and they listened and took on board some of our suggestions."
Next on the hit list of improvements was the IT system, which was replaced with a modern efficient systems in December 2005.
The first signs of the housing benefit department's recovery started in 2004, when 6,000 more people were paid housing benefit.
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Page Last Updated: 29 July 2008