Introduction
Lancashire County Council is the local authority for Lancashire County, providing upper-tier services to their citizens including children’s services, adult social care, and infrastructure.

Challenge
The council’s Welfare Rights service team was frustrated that its legacy casework system was no longer fit for purpose in meeting vital Welfare Rights service needs.

With restricted functionality, the council could no longer meet changing business needs, nor the reporting requirements of a Welfare Rights system. The legacy system couldn’t cope with the case recording, GDPR and process requirements of the welfare service — negatively impacting team performance and efficiency due to manual workarounds.

Solution
Lancashire County Council wanted a user-friendly, bespoke case management solution to meet recording, data sharing and process requirements and solve challenges, including lack of flexibility and functionality.

Its digital team had already invested in Netcall’s intelligent process automation platform, Liberty Create, as an enterprise low-code solution — to allow it to control its own digital solutions and move away from vendor-led solutions.

The Welfare Rights Case Management system records detailed and confidential casework in a secure environment, allowing staff to support the most vulnerable people in Lancashire and ensuring they get the right advice they need to resolve complex benefits issues.

With Netcall, reports and information requests are dealt with at the touch of a button and allows the team to build interfaces and pages for the management of clients and enquiries.

The new system supports a customer-first approach, giving staff instant visibility of and access to casework across the whole service area. Appropriate managers can adjust their own list data as and when needed, enabling real-time responses.

By replacing manual activities, the workflows ensure all staff, with different permissions and digital skills and abilities, can easily use it. It supports good quality and timely recording of casework activity, and easy application of good practice data protection measures like controlled access and automated deletion, said Netcall. Reporting is vastly improved, with an instant view of all current cases, campaign monitoring and cash gains.

Additionally, Lancashire County Council continues to build additional applications using low-code. Work is underway to use Liberty Create to custom-build a case management tool that will handle asylum seeker cases, including critical reporting.

Outcomes and next steps

• Data import of more than 13,000 clients with over 14,000 enquiries

• 165,000 enquiry notes

• Visibility of more than £20 million worth of successful outcomes for the past six years of data

• 0 complaints on implementation

• No impact on live service

• 25 percent increase in casework efficiency/ caseload capacity

• Improved work allocation

• More efficient appeals handling

• Instant reporting

Lancashire said it is prioritising digital service delivery by implementing a robust digital strategy that will include all digital services and infrastructure networks. To date, this includes delivery of other apps like Council Event Ticketing and Supported Living Case Management, among others, with a future forward focus on expanding citizen-first digital services.

Lancashire is also actively working with other councils to share vital information about its case management tool build, enhancing cooperative working for wider citizen benefit.