Case Study – Karbon Homes

The challenge

Karbon Homes formed in 2017. Its footprint covers the North East of England and Yorkshire, with around 34,000 homes across diverse communities, all facing different challenges.

As a social housing landlord manually processing Universal Credit (UC) claims and rent uplifts consumed hundreds of staff hours annually. Delays in verifications slowed down tenant support, compounding workloads.

The requirement

Karbon Homes integrated the Automated UC Landlord Plugin tool into its MRI Open Housing Management System in March 2025.
The UC BOT was delivered to simplify the submission of all work items in the To-Do-List within the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) Landlord Portal. Key deliverables included:

Automated submissions to the landlord portal

Instant SMS alerts to tenants confirming their housing costs

Exportable reports of upcoming UC payments

Exception management reporting to support data integrity

The results

Thanks to the UC BOT, we’ve been able to verify over 11,000 Universal Credit claims in record time. Work that would have previously taken several weeks and required us to divert colleagues from their core duties as well as using overtime. This year we completed it in just a matter of days, marking a significant improvement in both efficiency and resource management.”
Rob Jeffreys – Head of Income

Faster rent verification

Being able to get through claims significantly faster meant customers were getting their full UC entitlement straight away and did not have to wait for backdated payments of benefits, which would normally increase technical arrears.

Improved data accuracy

The UB BOT has removed human error from manually calculating and typing in rent figures. This has ensured the data is right first time and reduced the need to resubmit.

Staff time freed up

In the financial years 2022 and 2023 Karbon verified around 11,000 UC claims at an average of 2 minutes per claim, totaling 333 hours of staff time.

The UC BOT is verifying on average in 3 seconds per claim so the same number can be verified in 8 hours.

Colleagues have been able to continue with their day jobs during April, which has ensured that the support available to customers has not been negatively impacted.

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