“We have recently commissioned Arum to work with us in undertaking a review of our current Council Tax and Business Rates collection processes, seeking to identify areas for improvement. They provided us with an initial report which provided detailed recommendations and a clear vision of what we can achieve in the future and a plan to enable us to get there. We are now working with Arum to implement the recommendations which will allow us to strive to become market leaders in Local Government debt collection. We are excited to be working with Arum and, in anticipation of the outcomes, we feel positive that this will allow us to continue to grow in terms of income collection, have a clearer analysis on how internal and external pressures impact this whilst giving us opportunities to reduce the risk of not collecting at an earlier stage.”
Director of Finance
The challenge
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council wanted to understand how to improve the collection of Council Tax and Business Rates whilst continuing to manage their customers fairly and having the ability to segment those that can pay versus those that are struggling to pay or are vulnerable.
They sought expert advice from Arum who are leaders in the delivery of strategic advisory and resource management for collections & recoveries, having 20+ years of working in highly regulated industries for major banks and central government departments.
The solution
Over a period of 2 weeks, we conducted a Current State Assessment (CSA) of key areas of their Council Tax and Business Rates collections function, including: segmentation and analytics, performance management information, operational execution, organisation and culture, and technology.
We made 42 recommendations for improvement that could be delivered within 6 months by blending the Arum & Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council teams across a focused transformation programme of work.
The results
Arum helped Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council to understand the underlying issues with their collections performance and the improvements required to ensure they met their business objectives. The improvements, which are currently being implemented, include:
- How to automate repetitive tasks to free up resource to concentrate on customer contact.
- Development of dynamic performance dashboards to ensure resources are available at peak times.
- Optimisation of their existing technology to deliver benefits without major changes to their systems, including ensuring customers can pay online.
- Changes to their collection strategies which would result in more cash being collected more quickly, and result in better outcomes for customers, including those who were vulnerable.