Housing and Council Tax Benefits Administration in England: A Long-Term Perspective on the Performance of the Local Government Delivery System

The Coalition government announced, in 2010, that between 2013 and the end of 2017 all existing claims to income-based welfare allowances, including housing benefit, would gradually move to the Universal Credit (DWP 2010). This article evaluates the performance of the Council Tax and Housing Benefits Administration Services under the current system for the delivery of these benefits since they were transferred fully to local authorities in 1993 up until December 2011. During this period the performance of local government has been influenced by four successive national delivery regimes, namely: Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT); Best Value; Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) and Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA). An earlier article (Murphy, P., Greenhalgh, K. and Jones, M., 2011. Comprehensive performance assessment and public services improvement in England – a case study of the benefits administration service in local government. Local Government Studies, 37 (6), pp. 579–599) examined the CPA period in detail and found a significant improvement in performance across all types of authorities in all parts of the country during this period. The current article complements this earlier analysis and provides a longer-term perspective on the performance of the benefits service between 1993 and December 2011. The findings of this article show that under CCT the performance of the system was poor, there were wide variations in individual local authority performance, with many acknowledged inadequacies in the system and unacceptably high levels of fraud. However, towards the end of CCT and in the subsequent Best Value period the antecedents of some of the tools and techniques subsequently used to drive improvement in the CPA era were either put in place or were being developed. The Best Value period itself did not show significant improvements in performance and it was not until many of the initiatives were refined, developed and applied within the CPA framework that sustained and significant improvements became evident. This overall improvement generally continued under the CAA although the previous trend of consistent reductions in the variation between authorities’ performance had changed between 2009–2010 and 2011–2012. It is too early to judge whether these latest trends will be maintained under the Coalition government’s localism regime.