High-volume manual tasks 

Housing providers need to verify tenants’ information when they make new or amended claims for Universal Credit (UC). It’s a repetitive process that must be completed at least annually for more than 50% of Gateshead Council’s tenants.  

David Loraine is the council’s Senior ICT Development Officer: 

“Rent verification was taking up huge amounts of time – around 8 minutes per case – and we often didn’t complete our Year End work until the end of June. We wanted to free our 15-strong income team from this low value work so they could focus on supporting tenants and maximising revenue.” 

End to end automation 

The council chose to implement NEC Housing’s UC rent verification tool and went live on 1 April 2025. David explains how the implementation process was quick and easy:  

“We were up and running in an hour, and the NEC team was really responsive.  We started running five cases first to check the tool was working, then stepped it up rapidly to 10, 20, 50, 200 and then took the limit away. Now, only one FTE needs to manage the whole process, mopping up the small percentage of cases where the tool spots a mismatch.”   

On average, verifications are now completed within 6 seconds rather than 8 minutes, meaning that all the checks were complete by the end of May 2025 – 6 weeks faster than in 2024.  

Following a recent update, the tool can also deal with so-called ‘untidy tenancies’, for example where there are two names on the tenancy but only one in the property, saving further time.  

For more information on the services NEC Software Solutions offers visit our website  necsws.com or get in contact with us at marketing@necsws.com.