Costs Involved

A standard pricing structure for local government has been agreed by Rotherham with the Consortium for the implementation and support of the eBenefits system along with a number of optional items. This is set out in the following table.

Software licences are perpetual licences with unlimited use for councils, their intermediaries and citizens. Discounts on the prices shown would be available to any Council seeking to implement in partnership with others. This would need to be discussed with Northgate.

The eBenefits system includes:

• Site-based licence to the boundary of the authority
• Assisted interview in claims/in work checks/changes to circumstances for Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Free School Meals.
• High-level eligibility calculator covering all welfare benefits.
• Benefit entitlement calculation sheet.
• Digital signature creation via an electronic signature pad.
• Automatic claim creation.
• View supporting document history.
• Integration with core benefits application and electronic document management and workflow systems.
• Interface standards for other back office system providers.
• eBenefits on a wireless link on a laptop/tablet PC.
• Home working through a broadband connection.
• Supported use by trusted intermediaries.

The optional items include:

eBenefits Self Service module

• Filters out qualifiers and non qualifiers
• Reduces waiting times since pre-qualification is done

eBenefits off-line module

• Off-line module to download caseload and synchronise to back-office systems.

eBenefits Transformational Services

• Business Process Re-engineering.
• Costing existing and proposed processes to identify full end-to-end savings.
• Organisational modelling.
• Training.
• Management of change.