Direct Payment Monitoring Tool

Essex County Council (ECC) are seeking a software solution that utilises the open banking technology to make monitoring of Direct Payments within dedicated bank accounts easier for the Direct Payment Recipient and ECC. ECC currently make Direct payments to around 3000 people each month. The Direct Payment (in line with the Care Act (2014) is a payment to allow the person to commission their own care and support. Of these 3000 Direct Payments (DP) there are 1,000 people who receive the funds into a bank account. ECC's DP agreement sets out that this must be a dedicated account for their direct payment only (i.e. no other payments are made into this account). As well as having a statutory duty to ensure people have their unmet assessed needs met under the Care Act (2014), ECC has a fiduciary duty to proportionately monitor these accounts to ensure the funds are being used to meet the need and not being misappropriated. This process is currently very manual and relies on DP recipients sending ECC's monitoring team copies of bank statements. This is very time consuming and inefficient, thus a new solution is required.

A pilot is planned to enable ECC's DP Monitoring Team to have easier access to the data they need to review individual dedicated bank accounts that hold people's Direct Payment (DP). This will initially be commissioned as a test and learn with a small sample of approximately 30 - 50 accounts to test the benefits of the approach for 6 months. If successful, ECC may look to introduce this technology with over 1000 dedicated bank accounts currently held by DP recipients following a further procurement. The following requirements are necessary: • A process that allows people to consent to ECC having access to reports of transactions taking place in their bank account. • The technology should enable access to information held on the dedicated bank accounts for the purpose of proportionate reviews. • The system should be able to clearly identify credits going in such as funds from ECC and the DP recipient's assessed charge contribution to the account • The system should also be able to identify credits paid out to agencies or Personal Assistants employed to give care and support as per the support plan outcomes • The system should be able to provide exception reporting to ECC when for example o cash withdrawals take place o Payments for utilities, groceries or gambling take place o The recipients expected assessed charge is not paid in to the account o No payments have been made out of the account • The banking system should be able to drill down were necessary to identify payments going out, to whom, the amount using identifiable data and not just a reference number • The data must be stored securely within the UK or EU meeting ISO 27001/Cyber Essentials Plus • Personal data should be psuedonomysed to increase data security