Mid Devon District Council Case Study

Previously, the Department used a manual process to sign up tenants, which was time consuming and inconvenient to customers who just wanted to pick up their keys. It also required travel across the district at times to remote locations where you could often not obtain a mobile signal and so had to be completed manually.

The council would have up to 20 people in a room as part of the sign-up process, with officers having to take each tenant away individually to sign the tenancy agreement. This process would usually take several hours (not including travel time) and had cost and environmental implications from the travel it required for officers and tenants.

There has been significant time and cost savings on the sign-up process for new tenants as there is no longer a requirement for officers or tenants to travel to meet in a location to sign the agreement. It also contributes to reducing their carbon footprint by moving away from paper-based processes and taking away the need to travel across the district.

Documents are now usually signed within five minutes compared to taking at least 2 hours from carrying out in person meetings and group sessions. All documents are now saved on the eSign’s document management system, which has made it much easier to save and find agreements easily.

This has resulted in the platform being rolled out to other departments such as Income, Housing Business Support, Estate and Housing Finance Performance Teams.

Key results:

• 330kg of carbon saved from being emitted from using digital documents.
• Tenancy agreement completion time reduced from 2 hours to 5 minutes.