Broadland is in Norfolk and includes the northern suburbs of Norwich and the rural areas to the north and east of the city. Broadland includes several market towns including Aylsham and Acle and numerous villages. The Broadland area covers 55,215 hectares and has a population of about 124,000. Currently the Council provides a range of services for 54,732 homes.
"Four thousand five hundred text messages and 5,500 emails had been sent out inviting people to make the switch; at one point text message replies were being sent back to the Council’s Revenue Services team at a rate of 20 per minute. Sending paper bills to every household each year is a very costly exercise and anything we can do to reduce that cost and help the environment has got to be good. Text messages are a fraction of the cost of sending out promotional letters, and the emails we sent out cost us nothing at all, so it is proving very cost effective.
Broadland is in Norfolk and includes the northern suburbs of Norwich and the rural areas to the north and east of the city. Broadland includes several market towns including Aylsham and Acle and numerous villages. The Broadland area covers 55,215 hectares and has a population of about 124,000. Currently the Council provides a range of services for 54,732 homes.
Broadland District Council like all Local Authorities is under immense pressure to reduce costs while improving service delivery. The Council’s Revenue and Benefits department identified four ways in which they would be able to make
savings:
In 2010 the Revenue and Benefits department of Broadland District Council purchased XLPrint’s document composition software, PARIS. The software was used to improve the formatting of Council Tax, Business Rates, and Benefit notifications produced from their CAPITA Revenue and Benefits application. At the same time the Council also purchased the PARIS Electronic Document Output (EDO) email module with the plan to promote the delivery of electronic bills.
Critical to the promotion of paperless billing was raising the awareness of the facility and the establishment of a quick and easy process by which residents could subscribe. To raise awareness the Council ran a successful paperless billing campaign utilising SMS and email messages incentivised by a prize draw.
The switch to XLPrint’s PARIS software has allowed the Council to produce fully formatted documents, negating the need for any pre-printed stationery. Today documents are printed on plain paper and the PARIS software ensures documents are personalised to meet the recipient’s needs. This combined with a move to multi functional printing devices (MFP) has halved printing costs. Payment barcodes are now automatically included on all reminder notices and benefit invoices. Where changes to stationery are required there is no pre-printed stationery wastage and changes can be implemented instantaneously at no cost. With PARIS any document can be used for promotional marketing. This has contributed to the increase in the adoption of paperless billing and direct debit payment.
One major advantage of the PARIS software is once a document has been generated in an electronic form it can be printed or delivered electronically as a PDF attached to an email. The savings associated with e-billing are substantial with the elimination of printing, posting and manual handling. It also has a positive impact on the environment. The Council is further improving service at reduced cost by making statutory information available via hyperlinks to the Council’s website. Speed of delivery is another benefit of email. A customer can call up with a change to their bill and an electronic adjustment notice can be issued while the customer is still on the ‘phone.
The promotion of paperless billing has been key to the success of this project and at annual billing in 2011, 2000 bills were sent electronically. The financial and environmental benefits of the e-billing campaign are clear. In addition Broadland Council has been further rewarded by winning the Gold Award for Race Online and the Bronze Award for excellence in Innovation awarded at the IRRV Performance Awards 2011.
