A Big Tick for the Council's Benefits Service

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Fri 15th Sep 2006

Major improvements in Milton Keynes Council's Benefits Service are praised in a national report by government watchdogs.

The Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI) sampled dozens of benefit claims, looked at numerous examples of people's changes of circumstances, analysed scores of items of data, and carried out in-depth interviews of officers during its inspection earlier this year.

And the results are good - with the BFI heaping praise on both the Council and its partners, HBS, who run the service on the Council's behalf.

The inspectors said: "The Council's commitment to continually improving its processes and procedures led to high levels of morale among staff. We found that staff felt empowered because their ideas were valued."

The inspectors' main findings included:

• The Council has made significant improvements in the performance measures the BFI examined. For example, the time for processing new claims has been slashed - down from 61 days in 2003/2004 to just 23 in 2005/2006 - significantly better than the national standard of 36 days.

• Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit claims are being processed the same day if the customer visits the Council's offices with all the relevant information.

• The fact that the Council uses the telephone wherever possible to contact the customer enables missing information to be obtained quickly.

• There are some areas that the Council needs to improve, such as the need to carry out quality checks before making a payment and improving its accuracy level of 94% to meet the national standard of 98%.

Councillor Sam Crooks, Liberal Democrat cabinet member responsible for the Benefits Service, said: "This report confirms what we already knew - that our benefit service has come on in leaps and bounds. It recognises the vast improvements that we have made, working closely with our partners HBS."