Beat The Cuts!

This is a package of products and services designed to allow local authorities to ‘flood’ their area with benefits awareness, knowledge and assessments. The aim is to permit any officer or employee of the authority to have access to e-learning about benefits at a basic and/or more advanced level and to have the calculators and advice systems, constantly updated, to use with citizens anywhere in the authority’s boundaries.

Additionally this package can be extended to

• Everyone working in health services, GPs practices, health visitors and hospitals
• Housing Associations and other social landlords
• Everyone in the voluntary and charitable sector. CABx, Credit Unions, groups for the elderly, the disabled, children, job-seekers, community and village groups.

The contents of ‘the package’ are:

ucForward

Ferret’s benefits assessment tool which enables non-specialist advisers to calculate means tested benefits entitlement for individuals.

pensionForward

Ferret's new software assesses the effect upon an individual´s means tested benefits entitlement of taking capital or income from pension schemes.

Ferrcalc

Ferrcalc is the speedy calculator for experienced benefits advisers.

E-Learning

E-learning courses introduce awareness and knowledge of the benefits system to users at a basic level and take that knowledge further in an advanced course.

Strati

This is Ferret's web services benefits calculation service. It allows individual or bulk assessments, reviews or reassessments to be carried out quickly and easily. An XML document, or individual cases, can be passed to the service and returned with detailed results and their component elements. The data structure of the representation can be created from an application, a form or by export from a case record. Speedy and flexible, the service, like all parts of the package, is kept up to date by Ferret automatically.

Costs

The package cost is determined by the size of the authority’s population but for an average area the annual cost for council use is less than a quarter of the average salary of a social worker while to add housing, 3rd sector and health brings the total to just over half that salary.