Revenues and Benefits

Revenues and Benefits Service

BT South Tyneside’s Revenues and Benefits team offers a high quality customer focused local tax collection and benefits payment service.

We collect over £52m annually from over 67,000 council tax payers and over £29m each year from 3,500 business rates payers. Additionally, we pay out over £73.5m to nearly 25,500 households. The Service is also responsible for investigating fraudulent benefit claims and in the last year it completed 119 investigations resulting in £124,000 being reclaimed. The Service also provides a comprehensive administration and post processing function for services based at Wouldhave House.

We use modern, sophisticated software systems provided by Capita, Northgate and Civica. These systems are used extensively throughout the local government community and as such we benefit enormously from a wide network of other users.   

We have a highly motivated and experienced team that has proven it can develop and adapt to change. We can offer:

• First contact resolution through a dedicated telephone team
• Dynamic payment plans – which offer people who are running into debt a greater choice of the ways to pay their arrears of council tax
• Specialist recovery teams
• Collection whilst being socially responsible
• Speedy assessment and processing of benefit claims – in some cases in 24 hrs

We are extremely proud of the fact that, despite the economic downturn, we were able to increase council tax collection and exceed our target by 0.4% in 2009/10. And in all other areas we were able to comfortably meet our KPI targets.

Within the operational teams, we have a number of individuals who have been trained in Business Process Re-engineering skills. We recognise that we can’t stand still and as a consequence, some of these people are currently working on shaping the Service to be even more efficient.