We are a small unit (1 FTE) offering benefits casework to tenants of a housing association.

We are being asked to think about setting a target for next years performance objectives, i.e. an amount of money to raise in addtional benefits, based on previous years performances.

The term benchmarking was also floated by which I understand to mean, are there national targets / levels of success that we can measure our performance against?

We already have a quality mark for general advice with casework in welfare benefits. We do not receive any outside funding.

Does anyone have any advice / information / ideas? Don't mind if you agree with the concept or not, I just need to have the information to hand.

Many thanks.

Hi I am not aware of any national figures for increasing take up - it would depend very much on a number of different factors eg tenant make up (are they elderly?), where you are starting from? (ie has much gone on before), what else is happening in your local area? What I can say is that we have 1 take up officer whose target for this year is £750,000 and she is heading for her first £1m. We measure only notified outcomes rather than predicted outcomes. The amount is made up of:

all arrears + (weekly amount x 52) if the award is longer than 1 year and actual length of award if less than 1 year.

Hope this helps

Shabir

email: shabir.elahi@blackburn.gov.uk

There was a workshop at the December 2005 NAWRA meeting about performance management and the presentation document is on the NAWRA page in Swopshop. Might give you a few ideas but it doesn't have specific numbers in.

I think you need to be wary about plucking any sort of figure out of thin air, and comparing different services. It's easy to see how someone concentrating on take-up can generate a figure of £750,000 to £1 million - but if you throw in other work - appeals against overpayments, backdating, incpacity for work etc. - the sums involved can be far less impressive, but take far longer in terms of time than take-up work. You also need to bear in mind that you can spend literally several working days on, say, a DLA appeal - with either failure as an end result or an award of a lower rate (income generated £834.60 over a year) - and yet spend 10 minutes appealing against a massive (£10,000+) HB overpayment and having that decision revised straight away.

You also need to factor in other work - such as training for other staff, information provision, dealing with queries from other staff etc etc - all of which means less time for casework and/or take-up, and doesn't itself generate any money.

I have always resisted setting any sort of target, other than improving on last year!

Thanks for that link, very useful.

I agree with all your points Bob, but I think I am fighting a losing battle. Ho hum.

Wed 15-Feb-06 03:36 PM by ken

The NAWRA workshop Andy highlights took place during the December 2004 Leicester meeting and the powerpoint presentation Advice Services – measuring performance is available here (as well as from the NAWRA rightsnet swopshop page).