A three star rating has been awarded to the council's benefit team, following a rigorous independent assessment of its benefit services.

The annual assessment by the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate, gave the City of York Council ratings of excellent against five of the 13 performance measures. This year's ratings showed an improvement on its 2006 assessment with four additional targets met this year.

"This is excellent news for the council's benefits team," said James Drury, assistant director for Public Services. "This external assessment is extremely rigorous and we have done better than ever before."

The assessment measures four areas - claims administration, security, user focus and resource management. The council has improved on the time it takes to processes claims - 40 days in 2005/06 to 35 days in 2006/07 - and how it deals with people making fraudulent claims.

"There are always areas where we can improve and the assessment has identified that we need to look closely at how we deal with appeals. This is something we will be working on this year and hope to improve on. Next year we hope to increase these scores even further and are already working towards the highest score of four stars," said James.

The findings of the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate will contribute to the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) rating that the government gives to all councils. The council's overall rating will be announced by the Audit Commission in February 2008.