Decision details

A decision was made to procure an offsite processing solution to enable the service to process the large increase of new claims for Council Tax Reduction and changes to these and Housing Benefit claims. A direct award was made to Civica following soft market testing and a successful tender bid, as this was the quickest solution and represented best value for money and will be funded by existing budgets and/or additional burden funding by DWP/MHCLG.

Following the outbreak of COVID 19 there has been increased demand on council’s Benefits Service with applications and changes to its Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction schemes. This assists low income families with financial assistance towards their rent and/or Council Tax liabilities.
As a result, a short to medium solution was sought to provide greater resource resilience to assess these claims, in addition to the council’s usual recruitment options.

A full tender exercise was considered but a framework direct award was made for reasons stated above. The use of agency staff and permanent recruitment were considered but rejected as more expensive and this being part of a longer term solution respectively.