Sefton Council’s Customer Centric Services division covers all aspects of Customer Services Citizen Transactions and associated support services. These include the collection of Council Tax, Business Rates and other Revenues. Also included are the assessment of Housing Benefits, Council Tax Reductions and other financial awards. Customer Services, include a telephone Contact Centre and One Stop Shops dealing with customer enquiries and interactions, on behalf of a wide range of Council services, via telephone, email, social media and face-to-face.
The division is committed to providing a high-quality of service and to measure our success in achieving this goal, we are publishing a summary of each team’s performance here. This will be updated on a quarterly basis:
- Work volumes - the team has continued to maintain the excellent work position with workloads. As at 30th June 2025, there were 9,065 documents outstanding, compared to over 15,000 documents at the same point in 2024 and 35,000 documents in 2023, Changes are being processed within two weeks compared to up to 16 weeks at the same time last year.
- My account / paperless billing- the team now has almost 27,000 residents registered for a My Account. Customers are using the online portal to see how much they need to pay in Council Tax and when payments are due. They are also using My Account to apply for discounts and set up Direct Debits and reporting any changes online with almost 60% of changes automated. Ongoing improvements being made to the portal to improve the look and feel for customers managing their account online.
- Premium Exceptions – 167 exceptions to the long-term empty/unoccupied furnished premium have been awarded since annual billing.
- Collected over £60.8million in 2025/26.
National Collection Performance Statistics for 2024/25 (published by UK govt.):
- Sefton remains the best performing Council in the Liverpool City Region with a collection rate of 94.8%. This is just 0.1% below last year’s figure which has been a real achievement as we raised the debit in the latter part of the year by £1.7m for the Single Occupier Discount review that was carried out.
- Sefton has moved up from 14th to 13th best performing Met Council.
- The collection rate is 1.2% above the average for Mets but remains 1.1% below the national average which has been a consistent figure over the last five years.
- Sefton has lowest percentage of overall arrears outstanding compared to debt raised in the Liverpool City Region. This demonstrates an excellent collection rate and a good approach to writing off uncollectable debt.
- Work volumes - the team has continued to maintain the excellent work position with workloads. As at 4th June 2025, there were 550 documents outstanding, compared to over 1,268 documents at the same point in 2024 and 1,843 documents in 2023, Changes are being processed within 7 days.
- My account / paperless billing- the team now has over 1,000 businesses registered for a My Account. Businesses are using the online portal to see how much they need to pay in Business Rates and when payments are due. They are also using My Account to apply for discounts and set up Direct Debits and reporting any changes online with almost 88% of changes automated.
- Phone calls- Between the 1st April and 15th June 2025. The team received around 50 less phone calls than the same time last year. This will be due to the team being up to date with incoming work and automation with changes reported via My account.
- Analyse Local RV finder – has identified approx. £530k in additional revenue.
- Completed the process of reviewing the Business Rates Web Pages to set up a new and improved microsite. Waiting for Comms to put the pages live on website.
- Collected over 23.5million in 2025/26
National Collection Performance Statistics for 2024/25 (published by UK govt.):
- Sefton are 5th best performing Met Council another great achievement again to be one of 5 authorities to hit over 98%. Sefton are 3rd best performer in the Liverpool City Region with a collection rate of 98.1%.
- That collection rate is 1.7% above the Met average and 0.8% above the National Average.
- Sefton has the lowest percentage of overall arrears outstanding compared to debt raised in the Liverpool City Region. This demonstrates an excellent collection rate and a good approach to writing off uncollectable debt.
- Accounts Payable- Supplier Early payment scheme, £25k raised in rebates
- Accounts Receivable- 200 Customers now signed up to Direct Debit
- Accounts Payable-there was 336k identified from the duplicate payment system that was incorrectly paid by Departments and Schools
- Landlord Portal (CA-LL) – Module now fully live and project due to close early July. Plan is to switch paper schedules off after 4weekly run 7th
- The new My account platform (Citizen Access module (replaces CA-B & CA-R) - Testing underway, target go live date is end of July but dependant on testing and integration working.
- NEC Document Management upgrade 71 – Enterprise Desktop Information (EDI) and the application test base have been upgraded to v5.71. UAT is currently being done on both existing and new functionality with an upgrade go-live target of the end of July
- R&B’s and Planning Team - Moved printing - from Hybrid mail to Aceni with no issues
- Release upgrades & System changes – including replacement DTI letters and reports
- QRC4 - government returns completed
Assessments Performance QTR 1 (April to June 2025/26)
| Tasks | Total Assessments Completed/ Awarded | Average Time Taken |
| Housing Benefit New Claims | 295 | 12.73 days |
| Council Tax Reduction New Claims | 896 | 38.06 days |
| Discretionary Housing Payments | 298 | 28 days |
| Emergency Limited Assistance Scheme | 951 | 2 days |
| Open Access Household Support Fund | 2,708 | 14 days |
Between 1st April – 30th June 2025, 87.31% of all incoming calls to our Contact Centre were answered, and 88.06% of prioritised services calls were answered.
Between 1st April – 30th June 2025, 70% of all calls answered waited less than 5 minutes. However, during our busiest times of the day 12.00 pm and 2.00 pm, this reduced to 65% of all calls waited less than 5 minutes.
Between 1st April – 30th June 2025, the average waiting time to see a Customer Service Advisor in one of our One Stop Shops was 9 minutes.
Between 1st April – 30th June 2025, Customer Services received 3 stage 1 complaints and 1 compliment. All of these, 100%, were answered within the target, 15 days. We received no stage 2 complaints.
In our most recent Customer Service User Experience Survey, in May 2025:
- a very high number of respondents, at both sites, said that their query was fully resolved during their visit (over 96% in Bootle & 98% in Southport)
- 100% of respondents were either ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Fairly Satisfied’ with their interaction with a Customer Services Advisor
- over 99% of respondents in Bootle, and 100% in Southport, were ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Fairly Satisfied’ with the whole experience of interacting with Sefton Council via Customer Services during their visit
- 6% of all respondents said they did feel they had been treated fairly
Recent feedback received from our customers during our Customer Service User Experience Survey, highlighted the difficulties some of our customers experience in trying to access Sefton’s online services. Throughout the period 1st April – 30th June 2025, we’ve continued to implement further improvements to our new Taxi Licensing portal. We’ve also been working with our partners in other departments to improve their online services and we will continue to provide digital assistance to all customers who genuinely require it.