Hello Whixley residents as you will appreciate I have received a lot of emails on this topic so below is a generic reply covering all those enquiries
Energy Payments to Residents
As I am sure you are all aware, the Council is responsible for administering payment of £400 to eligible residents for Energy Grants and £200 for Alternative Fuel Payments. The Council receives information on eligibility directly from Government (BEIS) and residents have to register through that route. The Council is therefore simply processing the payments and checking that the necessary evidence for spend is there where required.
We have experienced two significant difficulties in administering this scheme as a result of the way BEIS have conducted their end of the business –
Six of the seven former districts were registered and given access to the necessary files in order to process payments. The six districts given access have processed these applications. Unfortunately, in the Craven area BEIS had not managed, despite several escalations from colleagues, to provide access to the necessary salesforce platform to access the necessary files. This has only just been rectified and payments are now being progressed
The contractor used by BEIS to produce the necessary information has, for some reason, gone and dropped information relating to the new four unitaries in England and they are therefore having to go back and recreate the necessary information for North Yorkshire residents where they registered from 31 March 2023 onwards. We therefore have a significant number (estimated at circa 700) that have not been provided to us to date. We have discussed the matter with BEIS and they are putting in place new processes to give us a single point of access to the information but it appears we now need to enter into new sharing agreements and other such arrangements before we can get access to the information. Naturally, we are pushing them to expedite this and lining up to process those payments as quickly as we can.
This is not a happy state of affairs and I am sorry that residents are in this position but, as you can see from the above, I do not believe the majority of the incidents of non payment are down to the actions / in-actions of the council. Nevertheless, I will pass on any enquiries i get so that we can log those individuals and make sure they are on the payments files when they come through. Where they are we can then prioritise them for payment and, if they are not, then we will contact you and the individuals to make sure that they understand we don’t have that information and what they needed to do.
Regards
Arnold