Natural England - Document Capture Success Story

Natural England - Document Capture Success Story

Natural England (NE) is vested as a Non-Departmental Public Body through the merging of most functions from English Nature. These constituent bodies are the Landscape, Access and Recreation division of the Countryside Agency and most of Defra’s Rural Development Service and are tasked with delivering a more integrated approach to protecting and enhancing the natural environment in England.

NE exists to deliver a series of strategic objectives, which together conserve, enhance and manage the natural environment for the benefit of current and future generations.

To promote these objectives, NE manages a number of funding schemes to landowners and farmers to promote environmental management. The four largest schemes together have over 60,000 customers. Each customer scheme combination is managed as a case file which has a life of 5 or 10 years with annual (or more frequent) claims forms being submitted.

The schemes managed by NE are processed and managed from 8 regional UK offices which serve the customers in their region. Over half the tasks associated with scheme processing though did not require face to face customer contact and potentially therefore the work could be fulfilled at any office. Staff at the regional offices also tended to have different workloads which meant that staff at one office may be over resourced whilst another office may be under resourced.

Download the case study to find out more