---
title: Transforming Income Operations with Onward Homes & Southern Housing
description: A blog summarising how housing providers are transforming income operations with Robotic Process Automation.
---

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# [Transforming Income Operations with Onward Homes & Southern Housing](https://www.voicescape.com/blog/transforming-income-operations-with-onward-homes-southern-housing)

 Written by [Fiona Western](https://www.voicescape.com/blog/author/fiona-western) | May 29, 2026 8:50:50 AM

 

In our latest webinar, *“Introducing Robotic Process Automation: Cut Manual Tasks, Boost Income Collection”*, we asked attendees: *“What is your team’s biggest operational challenge right now?”*

Out of 100 responses, 50% cited capacity and workload pressures, while 33% pointed to repetitive, time-consuming tasks, and 6% cited errors - highlighting the growing need for a more efficient and effective approach to handling high-volume, day-to-day processes within the housing sector.

In the webinar, we explored how housing providers are using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to overcome these challenges - boosting efficiency, accelerating task completion, freeing up capacity for higher-value work, and ultimately, protecting revenue.

Onward Homes and Southern Housing shared how they've transformed operations and delivered measurable impact across** Universal Credit Verification, Direct Debit Uplifts, and Housing Benefit Overpayments **- including 79,000+ tasks automated, 40,000+ claims processed, and 2.5 FTE years of capacity freed up.****

**What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?**

RPA entails the use of “bots” to **automate repetitive, high-volume, time-consuming, and rule-based tasks** such as data entry and transfer, form processing, logging into systems, moving files or extracting information, etc.

Housing providers are using RPA to automate key processes such **as Universal Credit Verification, Direct Debit Uplifts, Housing Benefit Overpayments, temporary accommodation processes, and email inbox management.**

As a scalable platform, RPA can be extended across the organisation and adapted to support operational workflows in other areas - with examples including certification compliance, lettings applications, finance invoice processing, and other high-volume administrative processes. 

**Key Benefits**

- Reduced manual workload and operational pressure, freeing teams for higher-value work, such as supporting residents who need it
- Improved accuracy, data quality, and consistency in high-volume processes
- Full audit trails and seamless integration with core systems
- 24/7 processing capacity, including overnight and weekend automation
- Reduced errors, rework, and process variability
- Reductions in costs and protection of revenue

 

**Sector Success: Real-World Impact**

Onward Homes and Southern Housing demonstrated how RPA is delivering measurable operational and financial impact, at scale, across key use cases.

**1) Onward Homes – Universal Credit Verification & Direct Debit Uplift**

Rob Davies, Head of Customer Accounts & Money Advice, shared how Onward Homes transformed Universal Credit Verification (UCV), previously a major operational task due to manual processing and multiple DWP portals.

By implementing an off-the-shelf RPA solution in just weeks, the team automated UCV across multiple systems. Rob shared the measurable impact achieved - including improvements in processing speed, customer care, productivity and freeing up colleague time to focus on providing tailored support, with these key results:

- **40,000+** claims processed
- **8,000+ **in the first two months
- **80%+** automation success rate
- **£50k+** colleague time savings

Customer Accounts Manager, Michelle Fraser, then shared how this success was extended into **Direct Debit Uplifts**, replacing complex manual rent updates with a faster, more reliable process:

- **15,000** amendments in** 16 days**
- **~65%** reduction in rent enquiries
- **~£81k** in cost savings annually

She highlighted how this improved consistency, reduced risk, and increased transparency - while creating capacity during peak periods and standing as a proof point for wider automation across the organisation.

 

**2) Southern Housing – Universal Credit Verification and Housing Benefit Overpayment**

Emily Turner, Operational Support Team Manager, shared how Southern Housing has scaled RPA across several processes**,** including Universal Credit Verification (UCV) and Housing Benefit Overpayments (HBOP).

She explained how increasing complexity - including multiple DWP portals and legacy systems - made UCV highly resource-intensive, particularly during peak periods. RPA enabled the team to manage this at scale, delivering:

- **70% **automation success rate
- **1,300** hours saved annually
- **79,000+** tasks automated
- Equivalent to** 2.5 FTE years **of capacity freed up
- Plan to upscale in near future to reduce business exceptions, enabling a higher automation rate

Emily also outlined how her team has been able to transform Housing Benefit Overpayments from a reactive, manual, and time-intensive process into an automated, controlled, and scalable operation – delivering the following key results:

- Processing reduced from **10–60 minutes to under 1 minute**
- **80%+** automated processing rate
- **Zero** duplicate or invalid payments
- **£75k** recovered in** 6 months**
- **£166k** processed on time, reducing escalation to blameless recovery
- Plan to upscale to UC Overpayments in the near future

 

|   **Watch the full webinar** Click [HERE](https://info.voicescape.com/rpa-x-southern-onward-26-webinar-replay-form) to access a time-stamped recording of the full webinar to share with your team. |
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|   **Want to discover how RPA could transform your organisation's operations?** [Book a demo](https://info.voicescape.com/book-a-demo-voicescape?hsCtaTracking=a9aae3e2-9f09-42de-b6ab-fbaa1a8990a0%7C44acd098-ec8c-4a2d-959a-b9decce8b6bf) to speak to a member of the team, see the technology in action, and explore how RPA could work for your organisation.   |
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[View full post](https://www.voicescape.com/blog/transforming-income-operations-with-onward-homes-southern-housing)

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