Update on New Licensing System (Industry) 25 November 2016

November 28, 2016

There has been good progress this week in a number of areas.

• We are currently dispatching documents back to people after no more than eight working days. This is still above our target of five working days but has seen a steady improvement which we will continue to build upon.
• The number of incoming messages this week was the lowest recorded, since the introduction of the new process. This number includes requests for help with the new system.
• We have made more licence application decisions per day this month than in October – which was the most productive month since the new system began.  We expect to make over 10,000 decisions in November.
• The number of applications that are currently in ‘Next Steps’ despite the fee having been paid is at the lowest level we have seen.  These applications are mostly waiting for actions from applicants and our team is working through them, contacting people who need to visit the post office or send us documents.

The good progress that we have made is encouraging, although we are aware that there are some applications where things have gone wrong. We continue to examine the reasons for applications not progressing smoothly and we are working hard to deal with these applications as quickly as we can.

The licensing teams are still receiving help to process applications from colleagues who normally work in other areas of the SIA, and temporary staff

This week we have made some enhancements to the way that our system works.  Most of the changes upgrade the way that the system works for businesses:

• We were aware of a problem affecting businesses dealing with further information requests on behalf of their employees.  The SIA portal view has been changing from ‘business’ view to ‘individual’ view, which made responding difficult. This has now been resolved: business users signed into their SIA account will always see the business view, even when they are responding on behalf of an individual.
• When a business is looking to renew a licence on behalf of an employee, the renewals page will now display the name of the licence-holder, and not just their licence number.  We understand that this has been frustrating for businesses, and we apologise for the inconvenience.
• The ‘My Licences’ page for businesses acting on behalf of their employees has until now only been displaying 5 licences at a time.  It will now display ten licences.
• Some users previously had difficulty uploading documents or images to their portal accounts, due to a size limit of 2Mb.  This limit has now been increased to 12Mb.
• Companies that use the Licence Management function are now able to upload applicant photographs by clicking ‘Browse’, selecting a photograph, and then ‘Save’ followed by ‘Next’.
• On the ‘Our People’ page, businesses are now able to filter their employee application records by ‘All’, as well as ‘Accepted’ and ‘Declined’.  The search box for finding individual applications remains at top right of the screen.

We have a range of improvements planned to the system, including extra functionality that will make it more informative and easier to use.  Please let us know immediately if you come across any problems with the system, and we will continue to keep you up to date with our changes and fixes.