Debbie Lissemore, relationship manager at the Department of Work and Pensions, tells ehospice about Tell Us Once, a service that is helping to reduce the bureaucracy of having to contact lots of separate agencies when somebody dies.
When someone dies, there are a lot of things that need to be done at a time when the family least feels like doing them. HM Government’s Tell Us Once service enables bereaved citizens to securely report a death, just once, to multiple central government departments and local council services.
Receipt of these verified notifications enables organisations to quickly and efficiently take appropriate action. This includes stopping benefits and services, cancelling official documents, and arranging payment of any monies owed. These all help to reduce the potential for fraud, create resource savings and reduce the burden for families of having to separately contact many government organisations.
The departments and services that can be informed face-to-face, online, or over the phone include (but are not limited to):
- Council Housing, Housing Benefit, Council Tax, Blue Badge, Electoral Services, Adult Social Services
- HM Revenue and Customs
- Department for Work and Pensions
- HM Passport Office
- Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
- Public Sector or Armed Forces Pension Schemes
The service is voluntary to use/. It is accessed via a Registrar and this is usually done at the time that the death is registered. Having followed their formal procedures to register the death, the Registrar then has a statutory duty (in all local councils where Tell Us Once is offered) to input details about the deceased into the Tell Us Once IT system, including their name, address, date of birth, date of death, date of registration, and the registration district.
This generates a unique reference number which gives the deceased person’s loved ones access to their records. They can provide further information about themselves, about the next of kin, and about the person dealing with the deceased’s estate. They also choose which organisations they would like to inform about the death. As soon as they have completed this process and clicked on ‘submit’, verified notifications of death will be sent to all of those organisations.
The citizen also has a printed letter that confirms who they’ve told, as well as a checklist that acts as a reminder of other organisations they may need to inform (e.g. utilities companies, insurance companies, banks, etc).
Separately to Tell Us Once, a number of banks and building societies have also created their own death notification service to enable the easier notification of death to multiple financial institutions.
Since it began in 2011, Tell Us Once has won awards for innovation. It’s currently available to 97.84 per cent of the population across England, Scotland, and Wales. We hope to achieve 100 per cent population coverage in the coming months.
For more information visit Tell Us Once or contact Tell Us Once
Leave a Reply