WRITTEN ON September 27th, 2004 BY Helen S AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, What do we want?

What no-one so far seems to have pointed out is that it’s only of any use to the e-enabled members of society.

In the community that I serve, people don’t have PCs at home, many don’t work, are not computer literate, a proportion are only semi-literate. These people can’t shop on-line because they don’t have credit cards or, in many cases, debit cards. e-technology just isn’t part of their lives.

What does work is telephone form completion services, eg. Pension Credit, but they still need help checking the completed form when it is sent for signature and the resulting assessment.

I recently discovered that the Council Estate where I work has the highest Housing Benefit takeup of all the LA estates in Hackney – 72.9% as at mid-August. These people would benefit more from a simple one-stop shop for Council Tax, all Welfare Benefit claims, Tax Credits, Income Tax, and other things that I haven’t thought of yet.

Hackney used to have a one-stop shop for LA related matters, but it closed a couple of years ago.