Harrow transforms its parking services in partnership with Civica

As part of a wider transformation programme that has saved Harrow Council in North West London 45 million over the last three years, the local authority wanted to apply the process of achieving strong efficiency gains in other departments to revolutionise its parking services.

Using a combination of innovative technology from Civica and an ambitious approach from a management team with no direct parking experience, Harrow Council has overhauled its parking services administration and in doing so, provided a new model that will be of interest to other councils. As a council, Harrow issues more than 110,000 penalty charge notices (PCNs) per year. As a result of the new technology and processes in place, it has reduced overall staff costs by 30% as well as boosting productivity by more than 40% per annum compared with operations before the

Civica Enforcement (CE) platform and new working practices were introduced. The staff is now able to issue 30-35 letters daily against 15 per day in the past.  Fern Silverio, Divisional Director - Collections & Housing Benefits, Harrow Council, explained: "Harrow's parking services administration is a highly transactional function like departments such as housing benefits and local taxation. We had already made massive efficiency gains in revenues and benefits. We knew that the same model of transformation could be applied to parking. " "Despite the management team having no parking experience, we have proved that in highly transactional departments a combination of automating parts of the process and a clear strategic vision can free up staff to concentrate on providing a higher quality service for our customers. " 

We wanted to gain value from our Parking System, so the option to migrate to the Civica CE system with its integrated workflow technology meant we could more quickly automate the way we worked as well as integrate the technology to other council systems without the headache of setting up a new workflow as well as EDM. The cost saving benefit of this approach was also attractive."
Fern Silverio, Divisional Director - Collections & Housing Benefits, Harrow Council

The council had clear objectives for the transformation of its parking services division:

• Reduce costs of administration per ticket
• Automating appropriate processes
• Develop a web–based mobile service that helped improve customer interactions

Fern Silverio said: "We had a tight deadline for the parking transformation programme of 5-6 months and we knew we wanted to work with a technology provider that shared our vision for a level of service in parking administration. As well as sharing our goals and wanting to work in partnership, Civica was the only technology provider that offered Electronic Document Management software with document image and processing with the added ability to seamlessly integrate with,for example, our Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)."