Northamptonshire County Council has benefited from efficiency savings by making its online website for free school meal applications available to other local authorities. This case study forms part of our demand management, Children, young people and families, resource.
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This has reduced its cost from £6.70 for paper applications with paper proof of benefit, to £2.14 using the website. Based on existing volumes using the service, this represents a £55,000 annual saving.
By promoting the web address the council was able to increase eligible applications by 100 per cent in four years, and estimated that from testing its own usage, the cost to parent was reduced from about £3 per application to five pence.