Tewksbury Borough Council

Tewksbury Borough Council

A Netcall Case Study

Tewksbury canal with boats

Low-code Transformation Delivers £100k+ Savings

Tewkesbury Borough Council transforms digital services with the Liberty platform, saving over 2,000 hours annually.

  

The Challenge

Serving one of the UK's fastest-growing districts, Tewkesbury Borough Council needed to modernise services with limited capacity. Using Netcall’s Liberty Create low-code solution, their in-house team launched 20+ digital services, delivering exceptional online experiences that citizens choose to use, while achieving significant cost savings and efficiency gains.

As demand rapidly increased, Tewkesbury's small transformation team faced the challenge of modernising services without relying on external suppliers. They needed a solution that would enable their in-house team to quickly redesign citizen-facing services, replace paper-based processes with digital self-service, and integrate with existing legacy systems, and they wanted to maintain full control over functionality and design.

The low-code and intuitive nature of Liberty Create means we can create a customer focused system quickly and easily using the various tools in the build studio - adding more complex and custom functionality where it’s needed.

Clare Evans, Associate Director -Transformation, Tewkesbury Borough Council

The Solution

Tewkesbury introduced Netcall’s Liberty Create and Citizen Hub to redesign services. These solutions empowered their team to build and launch services in weeks rather than months. The intuitive platform enabled rapid development of customer-focused systems across multiple service areas.

Waste & Recycling Services

Redesigned missed bins, assisted collections and bulky waste booking services. The new system provides upfront information to residents, uses live operational data and equips crews with real-time dashboards on iPads - transforming a manual process into an efficient, self-funding digital service.

This service area has delivered one of the biggest digital impacts, including:

  • 60% of bulky waste bookingsare  now online
  • 79% improvement in collection rates
  • 70% recycled over landfill
  • £57,828 additional income in year one (261% increase)
  • 800+ admin hours removed
  • 46% reduction in reported missed bins


Citizen Portal

Tewkesbury launched an online portal for reporting issues, tracking cases and receiving automated updates. Now, citizens can access services with or without an account, with all reporting services and complaints channelled through the streamlined platform. Since launching, Tewkesbury has seen:

  • 42% reduction in complaints
  • 39% decline in enquiries
  • 5 days average delivery time
  • 29% fewer follow-up calls within the first 3-months.

Internal Systems

Tewkesbury created MyHR in 24 weeks, a centralised portal for timesheets, sickness and annual leave across all departments. They also implemented a unified room booking system that eliminated paper diaries and endless email chains, seamlessly coordinating bookings, refreshments and IT equipment. Improved internal systems have delivered:

  • £18,000 cost savings by operating HR in-house
  • 816 hours saved through automated HR processes
  • 350+ hours saved on room bookings
  • £11,500 additional cashable savings

 

The Results

  • Simplified systems have reduced officer admin time, enabling quicker customer response times
  • Over 2,000 hours saved through automating processes and communications
  • Automatic progress updates in real-time
  • Proactive customer communication
  • More manageable data
  • Better integration into existing legacy systems
  • Sharing with other councils on Netcall’s AppShare
  • Significantly improved council finances £100,000+ net of investment saved in the first 18-months
  • Increased capacity to drive service income, for example, a 35% revenue growth (>£300k) from garden waste over 3 years
  • Happier residents with 42% fewer complaints received.

Service Example: Planning application tracker

The team built a real-time tracker connected to back-office systems to give citizens instant visibility into their application progress via unique reference, parish, or address searches. Custom-branded automated emails and SMS notifications keep citizens informed, freeing officers to focus on complex enquiries, rather than answering status update calls.

This delivered:

  • 75% faster local land charge searches
  • 2,000+ residents registered for self-service updates
  • Custom-branded automated emails and SMS notifications
  • Simple search using a unique reference number, parish or address
  • Greater visibility, results displayed as a list and on a map
  • Improved navigation to the Public Access site
  • Average of 116 page views per day
  • Over £99,000 in cost savings since the system launched.
Tewkesbury borough council logo in white

Our waste and recycling services are high profile - we offer really good services to our residents and now we’re going to be able to offer a fantastic online experience to go alongside them. Utilising Liberty Create’s accelerators saved us a huge amount of time. We’re a council which is really committed to making our residents’ lives easier. The work of the Transformation Team is doing this, as well as helping us to reduce our carbon footprint and deliver on financial savings.

Peter Tonge, Head of Community Services, Tewkesbury Borough Council