Local Council Tax Support Schemes
      Back to home
      1. Knowledge Base
      2. Revenues Forms
      3. Local Council Tax Support Schemes

      Local Council Tax Support Schemes

      LCTS as a Discount

      Council Tax Support schemes provide help for people on low incomes with their Council Tax bill and they replaced Council Tax Benefit in 2013, with each Local Authority now being responsible for their own scheme.

      Whilst our existing integrated Housing Benefit New Claim form has dedicated rates and values files for Council Tax Support based on the old DWP method of Incomes and Allowances, many councils are looking at introducing simpler, banded schemes, based on household size and income.

      These schemes are designed to enable:

      • simpler administration
      • council tax staff to take over the administration of council tax support
      • a minimisation of the effect of income changes as a result of thousands of updates from DWP*

      *This is driven by the huge number of changes being sent to councils daily from the DWP from Universal Credit changes. If a council's scheme does not change the award a person receives based upon small income changes then there is less to administer.

       

      This shorter LCTS claim form interacts exclusively with the Council Tax Back Office application - not Benefits and provides the following:

      1. a) Online Form
      2. b) Retrieve Current Liable Parties/Occupiers
      3. c) Extract (Create a CSV output from this content and save it in an easily accessed manner)
      4. d) Form PDF (Create a PDF output of the responses the citizen made and save it and an indexing CSV to the network)
      5. e) Application Notepad Entry (Add a notepad entry of the details of the application)
      6. f) Calculation Engine (to let applicants know their award prior to submission).
      7. g) Push Local Discount Award into NEC (We call the MaintainLocalDiscount API to add/update the local discount based upon the band derived in the calculation).

       

      Integration

      As the form is fully integrated with NEC Revenues, the following steps are taken in the background as the customer progresses the form:

      New Application

      • Pull residents out this will provide:
        • Who the current occupants are
        • Whether they receive any discounts/exemptions
      • Add children/events
      • Joint tenants/co-owners not part of the household -change the recovery profile where appropriate
      • Backdating/Anything else (automatic backdate can be applied where the scheme allows for this)
      • Record Employer Details within a notepad entry
      • Calculate and award Discount
      • Notepad entries to confirm actions taken
      • Ability to use ‘Event Date’ functionality within the notepad, so as to make use of NEC Task Manager

      Change in Circumstance

      • Pull residents out this will provide:
        • Who the current occupants are
        • Whether they receive any discounts/exemptions
      • Add children/events
      • Joint tenants/co-owners not part of the household - change the recovery profile where appropriate
      • Backdating/Anything else (automatic backdate can be applied where the scheme allows for this)
      • Record Employer Details within a notepad entry
      • Record Date of change
      • Calculate and award Discount from the declared change date
      • End existing LCTS award where the customer no longer qualifies
      • Notepad entries to confirm actions taken
      • Ability to use ‘Event Date’ functionality within the notepad, so as to make use of NEC Task Manager

      EDMS Integration

      With NEC DM (and other EDMS applications) will work as it does currently.

      • We save the PDF of the application to a given location using the preferred naming structure for the council e.g. {AccountNumber}-{FormRefence}.pdf
      • We save a CSV file containing the necessary details to allow the EDMS to correctly index the document:

      e.g. Document type, Account Number, Form reference, Date, User Defined Code [to indicate whether it should be automatically archived (i.e. no user intervention), or which work stream it should be allocated to]

      Calculation Steps Detail

      • Determine the Council scheme specific to the applicant's circumstances
      • Calculate the net weekly amount of Universal Credit to include in the calculation
      • Determine if Minimum Income Floor is applicable and weekly SE amount to include
      • Convert employed earnings to total weekly amount for the claimant and partner
      • Determine correct earnings disregard and deduct from the total earned income (SENet + EINet)
      • Determine the weekly income from other benefits which are not disregarded.
      • Total the weekly incomes from UC, Earned Income and non disregarded General Incomes
      • Determine CTS Award Band % from the weekly income and their scheme.

      Localisation/Configuration

      The way the form and calculation work can be configured to the specific requirements of the customer by editing a file called configuration/lctsconfiguration.xml which can be found through the Files tab for the form in eGovHub Management

      Extract

      The functionality to manage LCTS Discount claims may not be fully included in the back office system (Capita/Civica) at the time of initial deployment.

      If this is the case the customer will need access to the raw data so that in future they can refer back to the data that they have and potentially import anything not already present.

      This data is available as a CSV extract through a Swagger endpoint for which we provide the url and authorisation details per customer.