Newcastle City Council streamlines community grants processes with low-code
Newcastle City Council (NCC) is the local government authority for the city and metropolitan borough of Newcastle upon Tyne.
In a bid to make community grants more accessible to its citizens, NCC needed a digital-first case management solution that could bridge multiple technologies, automate processes and deliver accurate reporting for compliance. The ultimate goal: to deliver a streamlined and transparent end-to-end application process for a range of grants including, more recently, its Clear Air Zone (CAZ) grant.
Along with handling telephone calls, the council team had to field numerous unstructured emails. This created more manual work for staff who had to re-key customer data, such as bank account details, and rely on manual spreadsheets to process payments. With limited validation capability, the risk of claim fraud, error and audit failure were high.
Plus, in response to a legal directive, NCC needed to reduce legal levels of traffic-related pollution. Owners of specific vehicles, which didn’t meet national CAZ emissions requirements, needed a simple way to check eligibility and apply for grants. This would include complex applications involving a number of vehicles in a fleet.
They turned to Citizen Hub and Liberty Create, our low-code platform.
“Liberty Create has given us the ability to build new solutions at pace. I’ve never felt so excited and empowered about saying to customers with the local authority that yes, we can do this now!”
Paul Doney
ICT Manager Digital Solutions, Newcastle City Council
“With Liberty Create, we’ve been able to reduce manual processes related to bank payments and reduce the number of staff dealing with telephone calls. Fraud and audit teams absolutely love this product as everything is dealt with in one application and they can easily use data to detect fraud or any errors.”
Paul Doney
ICT Manager Digital Solutions, Newcastle City Council
NCC has a timetable of planned replacements as it continues on its journey with Liberty Create.
Some upcoming projects include ICT, fraud and audit case management, an employee portal, replacing online forms and other replacements of third-party products which will deliver real cashable savings — whilst providing an ability to build products at pace and consolidate applications.
2,100
hours saved
£3.2m
savings in license fees
Improved
customer experience
Take back control and discover the benefits for yourself
The councils wanted to remove departmental silos and enable an agile workforce to work from anywhere. To effectively automate services and prioritise workloads, they needed a single integrated platform to host all customer requests, perform complex case management and operate workflows.
With demand rapidly increasing, Tewkesbury Borough Council turned to digital, using their digital transformation program to improve services for its customers, deliver environmental improvements and make significant financial savings.
A digital team, formed of citizen developers and traditional IT staff, are providing low-code enabled Innovation-as-a-Service for the council’s evolving requirements.
