Milton Keynes City Council - Case Study

Who are Milton Keynes City Council?

Milton Keynes City Council work hard to provide services that better support everyone across their community. Providing a variety of services they support children, families, and individuals across all their social care and wider local government services needs.

With their long-term vision to ensure everyone in Milton Keynes can lead happy and healthy lives, they are increasingly keen to find new ways to become a thriving, progressive, and sustainable city.

The Challenges:

Like many local authorities, Milton Keynes City Council has struggled to both manage the demand for their SEND transport and their temporary accommodation services.

With the Local Government Association projecting special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) transport to rise by £127 million to £1.2 billion by the end of 2024, and individuals and families seeking temporary accommodation reaching over 94,000 last year, the demand for both keeps rapidly increasing.

Milton Keynes City Council has also faced significant challenges including rising pupil numbers and pressure on budgets, so they wanted to find a new way to better manage their costs without sacrificing the quality of their service.

However, despite the increase in demand, their budgets are getting more and more stretched. Milton Keynes therefore needed a way to effectively manage SEND transport demand to keep children safe whilst being resourceful with their budgets and resources. They also needed a system that improved their housing compliance to help break the homelessness cycle and help individuals out of temporary housing more effectively.

To do this, Milton Keynes has been coming up with multiple different schemes to incentivise landlords to let out their properties to residents in temporary housing. However, to manage the payments to landlords and the complaint properties available, Milton Keynes also needed a solution that could help them deliver their scheme.

The Solution:

To overcome their challenges, Milton Keynes initially invested in Access Adam Transport where our solution worked alongside QRoutes Transport Technology to help the council significantly increase their provider base to optimise routes, generate significant cost savings, and ultimately provide higher quality SEND Transport to provide children the opportunity to thrive.

In 2021, Milton Keynes City Council, whilst creating their AST scheme, started working with Access Adam Housing as not only did we offer a sophisticated and easy-to-use solution to manage their temporary accommodation services, but we were also able to create a bespoke solution to better facilitate their AST scheme to help them tackle the issues of homelessness across their community.

The Outcomes:

By investing in both our housing management solution and transport management solution, Milton Keynes City Council has been able to experience a variety of benefits that ultimately have been able to improve the quality of life of their residents in many different ways.

1. Increased competition and supplier base

One of the biggest outcomes Milton Keynes has experienced since using both Access Adam Transport and Access Adam Housing is the increase in its supplier base.

For example, their provider base for their SEND transport has increased by 31% since using our cloud-based software. Now both Milton Keynes transport teams and their providers can operate on the go and adapt routes as needs and resources change. So far investing in Access Transport has helped the council perform better against the budget and save over £750,000 since the project began. This, in turn, has helped Milton Keynes better manage transport routes for over 1,400 children with SEND needs.

This greater pool of providers has generated great cost savings across each trip to enable children to have the transport they need to provide opportunities for all children, regardless of their needs, to thrive.

The systems are very efficient for users and in an area that is always changing, requests and alterations are quick to do so staff can then concentrate on all aspects of their role, and aren’t overcome with time-consuming tasks. The new systems give our team clarity and confidence which have helped them feel more secure in their roles.

Equally, investing in Access Adam Housing has enabled Milton Keynes's provider base to increase from 4 suppliers to 240 to help find appropriate temporary housing quicker, as well as help individuals out of homelessness and into secure tenancies for at least 2 to 3 years providing the support they need to never get stuck in the homelessness cycle again.

2. Improves Compliance

One of the biggest benefits Milton Keynes has experienced across its transport and housing services is their improved compliance. Here through using products from our Access Adam ecosystem, all compliance, safety certificates, and regulations from providers are now automated to prevent Milton Keynes from ever working with an incompliant provider again. This, in turn, ensures that children have access to transport that best facilitates their needs. Individuals and families can also have access to temporary housing to help them get back on their feet safely without having to worry about being evicted or how to pay for the next round of bills, which in terms helps individuals being able to manage both their physical and mental wellbeing better.

Milton Keynes also found that suppliers for their SEND transport can be onboarded in as little as 10 minutes and that they can now be better protected if a supplier can no longer provide its services. Here our transport solution quickly redistributes routes fairly to the rest of the market so no child goes without the SEND transport they need.

Across their housing services, thanks to our automated compliance, since 2021 99.5% of Milton Keynes properties are compliant in providing the housing needed to cater to all individual and family needs.

Compliance figures have improved massively since using Access Adam. Before it was a very manual process having to chase providers for gas safety certificates, energy performance, and electrical certificates. Obviously, this was very time-consuming and it wasn’t a good use of our time either. But now with the Adam platform, we can’t book or use a property until those certificates are on there. We can track when providers are due and we get notifications about 28 days before and 14 days before so we can chase the providers in advance as well.

Danny Hassall, Senior Supply and Acquisitions Officer at Milton Keynes City Council

3. Improved efficiencies

Across both Milton Keynes transport and housing services, Access Adam has enabled the council the flexibility to unbundle some contracts and get prices for individual routes or housing needs instead of grouping and tendering them all under one contract. This, in turn, has enabled individual cases to better adapt to individual needs as well as help the council secure contracts at a fraction of the price.

For their transport services, this has enabled smaller operators to be able to bid for routes that previously would have been beyond their capacity. Here operators can immediately stay up-to-date with new contracts to enable Milton Keynes to act quickly, help maintain competition, and promote a transparent and fair approach while improving cash flow.

What has made Milton Keynes’ experience of using Access Adam Transport better is the relationship we have built with them to constantly improve their services. Here we worked with Qroutes, a home-to-school route planning tool, to focus on sustainable transport. We were able to optimise routes at the click of a button and were able to reduce their number of routes from 195 to 171.

Likewise, Milton Keynes housing services have also benefitted from multiple efficiency improvements. An example of the biggest efficiency experienced is that they have been able to digitally transform their processes and workflows to migrate from manual to digital processes. This, in turn, has enabled Milton Keynes’ workforce to receive updates to chase providers at both the 28-day and the 14-day benchmark in advance of deadlines. Here no paperwork or compliance checks is done last minute reducing the risk of individuals being placed in homes that don’t suit their needs.

Here Milton Keynes has been able to streamline their invoicing to prevent overpayments and gain a more holistic approach, introduce cost caps, and reduce nightly spending and hotel use to ultimately boost their schemes and campaigns to combat homelessness in their area.

More specifically, our software has been able to establish a bespoke solution to facilitate their AST scheme and now they have been able to move 104 households out of temporary accommodation into more secure tenancy and housing. Now they have over 200 complaint houses in the scheme to help prevent homelessness. Despite Milton Keynes having to pay landlords to incentivise them in the scheme, they have been able to save significant amounts of costs compared to what they would spend on temporary accommodation.

Since investing in our housing management system they have been able to reduce the number of nightly stays in hotels (one of the most expensive forms of temporary housing) from 100 individuals a night to now on average 8 to 9 individuals.

The Future:

It is clear since Milton Keynes City Council has invested in our Access Adam portfolio, they have been able to digitally transform both their housing and transport services to improve quality of life, experience significant cost savings, and have better use of their resources and budgets.

It has been great to be a part of Milton Keynes’ digital transformation journey and we are looking forward to helping continuously improve their services and outcomes further.

We want to help Milton Keynes provide consistent, reliable, and safe SEND transport for the more vulnerable children of their community, as well as help them continue to prevent homelessness in the area to consistently ensure housing compliance and build upon their already successful AST scheme.

For more information on how we can digitally transform your housing and transport services to achieve digital maturity across your local government services contact us today.

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