Benefits under lockdown
Following their special mention in the Managing Director's message to staff last week, we caught up with Elyn from the benefits team to find out a bit more about how their work has been affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Friday 15 May, 2020
First of all, what does the benefits department do?
The Benefits department deal with Housing Benefit, Council Tax Reduction (which replaced Council Tax Benefit in 2013), Discretionary Housing Payments, and Free School Meals. We are a separate department to the Council Tax department – they charge, we help to pay!
How has the department been affected by the pandemic?
The biggest change to the department has undoubtedly been the switch from office-based staff to home working. Luckily, we have had homeworkers in the department for over a decade, so have experience and knowledge of what is required and expected – from equipment to communication.
Our assessment and management teams were set up for homeworking pretty quickly once the licenses were obtained from IT and staff have adjusted well to the new way of working, but we do also still have a minimum number of staff in the office who adhere fully to social distancing rules.
How about your workload?
There have been unprecedented levels of new claims for Universal Credit across the country, and the Vale of Glamorgan has been no exception.
We have received approximately 740 new claims between 16 March and 12 May, along with 1281 Universal Credit new claim alerts.
This is compared with around 390 applications and 342 Universal Credit new claim alerts for the same period last year.
We have paid out over £4million in housing benefits and discretionary housing payments to private tenants, housing association tenants and council tenants since 16 March.
So our caseload has doubled! And because the benefits system is complicated and new to many, we have received a huge number of queries by email, by post and by telephone.
It is worth noting that March and April are usually our busiest months of the year anyway, so with additional claims, changes in regulations and our usual end of year processes it's fair to say the team have been extremely busy and have worked incredibly hard in difficult circumstances, which is why we wanted them to get a mention and a thank you in the Managing Director's message.