West Berkshire Council

The council’s current process for the management of rent accounts for temporary accommodation, bed and breakfast, and similar is manual and paper based and cumbersome, whilst communication with service users is via email, telephone, or face-to-face.

The parts of the process that do use technology utilise the council’s finance system, a system not designed for this purpose which does not meet the needs of the service users well given their transient nature.

We would like to run a discovery phase for a new service that allows users to self-serve, reducing the administrative burden and allowing them to access information about their rent account when they need to.

This work will deliver:

• Research into the user needs a temporary accommodation rent account service should meet.
• A prototype process for a temporary accommodation rent account service.
• Prototype patterns for the front end of a temporary accommodation rent account service.
• Descriptions of which types of technology would need to be used.

In summary we would like to discover how to transform a manual process for managing rent accounts for temporary accommodation, to reduce waste and better meet user need.