The challenge
South Hams District Council has established itself as a forward-thinking local authority, evidenced by their use of the Liberty platform to consistently improve service delivery and efficiency.
After years of frozen parking charges, the council faced pressure to increase charges but wanted to support residents. The goal was to offer discounted parking rates to local residents, while maintaining standard rates for visitors. This type of scheme had never been implemented by any other UK council.
AI-powered document processing
The council expected around 30,000 applications each year and faced unpredictable daily volumes ranging from a handful to hundreds. With political pressure for processing in 24 hours to enable quick access to discounted parking and a small team of six people, they needed to leverage AI-powered technology to process multiple document types, without adding any manual processing staff. South Hams turned to Liberty IDP, our intelligent document processing solution, as part of their existing Liberty platform ecosystem, which already included Liberty Create, Converse and RPA solutions.
“Councils can leverage AI-powered document processing to deliver meaningful cost savings while improving service quality. By using Liberty IDP, we avoided the need to hire extra staff and the associated overheads and achieved annual savings. We also maintain a 24-hour service turnaround, which was impossible with manual processing.”
Jim Davies
Head of Customer Improvement, South Hams District Council
The solution
The technical architecture for the resident’s parking scheme is a comprehensive integrated solution, starting with a Liberty Create form serving as the customer portal for resident applications. This flows into Liberty IDP as residents submit photos of V5C forms, lease agreements or Motability contracts using their mobile phone.
Addresses and vehicle registration details are checked against submitted information with automated data validation. A Liberty RPA automation seamlessly updates the parking software and mobile payment systems.
Liberty IDP’s AI capabilities are crucial in managing the wide range of document quality and formats, successfully processing low-resolution images, documents photographed at an angle, with a shadow or reflection. Liberty IDP can even handle images that are backwards.
Workflow management capabilities provide integrated failure handling to manage any exceptions and communicate with applicants.
The implementation approach means that the team designed the entire process around the technology capabilities, rather than retrofitting existing procedures. This enabled optimal workflow design from the ground up and resistance to change was minimal.
Implementing Liberty IDP on the resident’s parking scheme bought annual savings of around £120,000 in avoided agency staffing costs, which would have been needed to manually process the 30,000 applications per year.
Beyond these direct staffing savings, the council also avoided the other costs associated with recruitment, staff training, equipment provision, software licensing for extra users and management overhead required to supervise the 2-6 full-time staff – who would have needed to work seven days a week.
The Liberty platform delivers predictable, transparent pricing, unlike credit-based alternatives such as Microsoft PowerApps. This gives South Hams greater budget control and confidence in scaling their automation efforts.
The accuracy of the resident’s parking scheme system compared very favourably to traditional OCR systems, successfully reading documents that human operators could barely decipher, including extremely poor-quality images. Its automatic scalability can handle demand spikes with no extra staffing. There is no margin for human error or inconsistencies in processing. Skilled parking team members are free to work on higher-value activities.
Any errors are provided with clear reasons for failure so that officers can process quickly to resolve. The automated 24-hour cycle was dramatically faster than the estimated 2-week manual processing timeframe and this met the requirements for fast processing that the team were asked to deliver.
The solution offers excellent customer experience through a streamlined mobile-friendly application featuring a QR code handoff for easy document upload from mobile devices – the entire process is accessible, fast and user-friendly for residents.
“Using Liberty IDP and the rest of the platform has opened up some processes that we never considered trying to improve before. We can attack a lot more inefficiency – even processes that we previously thought would be too hard to tackle – and streamline many areas that previously had no additional support.“
Jim Davies
Head of Customer Improvement, South Hams District Council
The result
£120k+ Saved
avoided hiring 5+ full-time staff, plus additional costs of management and equipment
30k+ Applications
processing capacity to handle 30,000+ applications annually
Superior accuracy
compared to OCR systems and Microsoft PowerApps alternatives and elimination of human error
24-hour Processing
compared to an estimated a
2-week manual timeframe
Predictable pricing
giving better budget control
Automatic scalability
handles demand spikes
Poor quality images
robust document processing can handle even poor-quality images
Streamlined CX
mobile-friendly application offers great customer experience
Error transparency
clear failure reasons given enabling quick resolution
Staff optimisation
skilled team members can focus on higher-value activities
Verified by South Hams District Council – June 2025
Hear it for yourself
Trailblazing local government transformation
The project’s success has positioned South Hams to expand automation across additional service areas, adding IDP into their toolkit for broader digital transformation. Their pioneering approach demonstrates how forward-thinking councils can harness AI-powered document processing to overcome complex operational challenges which deliver exceptional value to residents.
Councils need not choose between cost control and service quality – intelligent automation can deliver both simultaneously.
Find out how South Hams has used Liberty platform to transform processes three times faster to drive improved CX using low-code and their contact centre and also utilised RPA for faster, more efficient working.