If you receive benefits and your circumstances have changed you can now tell South Hams District Council through the internet. No need to phone the Council or go into the office.
If you need to tell South Hams District Council about changes to your current circumstances which might affect your benefit, simply go online and fill in a form. It has never been easier or quicker to give the Council vital information which could alter your claim.
Introducing this new function on the website, comes just weeks after the successful launch of an online claims form for new claimants.
Since the middle of July when the new online claims form went live, South Hams District Council say that nearly 50% of all new new claims are now made through the website. Making life much easier for residents and for the Council staff.
Resident can now input all of their information at a time and place which is convenient for them and the information is processed much quicker because it requires less double handling of information by the Council Officers. Claimants can also upload photos of their documentation, so that the Council do not need to wait for documents to arrive via the post.
Before this new function was introduced a typical claim would take approximately 42 days to process. In August this year, following the launch of the new online process, the average length of time it took to process a claim fell to just 23 days and nearly 30% of the claims processed were actually processed within 10 days.
South Hams District Council’s Executive Member for Customer First, Cllr Hilary Bastone said: “I am delighted to see this new service working well for customers and pleased to see that customers can now tell us of their change of circumstances online too.
“Of course this will speed things up for the claimants, but it also helps the Council Officers as well. If those people who can tell us on online do so, then we will see a reduction in the number of calls coming through the call centre and we will be able free up call centre staff so that they can spend more time helping those people who for whatever reason cannot do it on line.”
Anyone wanting to make a claim or tell South Hams District Council of their change of circumstances should visit: www.southhams.gov.uk/benefits
