This Club was first established in 2003, as a cooperative exercise between CIPFA and the National Association of Financial Assessment Officers. The intention was to combine NAFAO members' knowledge of the assessment process, and CIPFA's expertise in benchmarking, to produce useful and interesting comparisons of performance in this important and difficult service. In 2009 the club will be running in its 7th year.

One objective of the Club is to meet the requirements of the Department of Health's Fairer Charging guidance about identifying the costs of administration, so part of the information produced deals with the overall cost of the assessment process in relation to the workload. However the Club's scope is wider than this, and the information produced by the Club includes:

• Workload measures
• Staffing levels and grades
• Type of staff involved in the process
• Location of financial assessment staff in the organisation
• Charging policies and methods including disability related expenditure
• Collection and payment methods
• Performance indicators such as speed of assessment, collection rates etc.
• IT systems used
• Direct payments
• Re-assessments procedures.

The information that we feed back has been extremely valuable to our members and this is the reason that over we have a rejoin rate of over 70%.

For further information, please contact Andy Hill, Benchmarking Analyst on 0208 667 8154 or andrew.hill@cipfa.org.uk.