The 1st February was the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Caseworks User Group.

It was hosted by South Lanarkshire Council, in their marvellous new Whitehill Neighbourhood Centre
(look at the photo gallery).

There were some 25 representatives from North Ayrshire Council, Glasgow City Council, South Lanarkshire Council (the hosts) and Strathclyde Police. Unfortunately West Lothian Council could not be represented due to sickness, but infact representatives from HUBSolutions did attend a system-upgrade seminar at West Lothian the day before the meeting, and were able to feed in several opinions expressed on that day.

The meeting looked at the new Home Security Module which had been created with North Ayrshire Council and the Notify and Respond and Mobile Data Capture Solution, created with Glasgow City Council and South Lanarkshire Council. It also looked at the new Scottish pages for SSST and Possession Action, customised with North Ayrshire Council.

As usual with these meetings, HUBSolutions took the meeting through new facilities, not yet fully released, and facilities planned but not yet developed, to get useful feedback as to priorities. In common with the meeting of the Northern User Group in October, the meeting felt that a Time Line Case History would be immensely valuable, that exceptional validation of Notes to avoid misuse would be worth the effort, and was somewhat sceptical about the feasibility of Action Plans which attempted to anticipate for the User what the next stage or action in a case should be. The general view from professionals seems to be that the complexity and unpredictability of ASB Casework made this virtually impossible, and the process should not be compared to the recovery of rent arrears where these kind of facilities were common place in IT systems.

The meeting ended with a discussion of frequency and format of future meetings. A firm view was expressed that the Regional Meetings, which HUBSolutions had started should continue, rather than move to a UK wide meeting. Issues were, the travelling distance and cost, and the fact that ASB legislation in Scotland was not the same as in England. It was agreed that future frequency should be two or even four times a year, so clearly the delegates felt the day was worthwhile!
Click here to see pictures of the user Scottish User Group...

After many months of design and customisation, HUBSolutions has completed two new pages for North Ayrshire Council, specifically addressing Scottish Legislation in respect of the SSST. The "SSST Details" page allows all the stages in the process of demoting a secure Tenancy to SSST to be defined, including an auto-calculate on dates and a section for Tenancy extensions. The "Possession Action", now offers completely different screens, depending on whether possession is against a secure tenant or a SSST tenant. Both of the new screens make heavy use of the multiple Document Upload facility and of User Help fields.