Fife Council allocated over £160,000 to benefit capped households in just eight months

The benefit cap limits the amount of benefits people can claim. To mitigate the impacts, the Scottish government provided extra funding for Scottish councils to distribute Discretionary Housing Payments to households affected by the cap.

Fife Council analysed its administrative data via the LIFT platform to quickly and accurately identify households who were eligible. They distributed over £160,000 in just eight months to households most in need.

The benefit cap, introduced by the UK government in 2013, limits the total amount of income from benefits that most working age people can receive.

To help households impacted by the cap, the Scottish government added an £8.6 million top up to Discretionary Household Payments (DHP) for the years of 2022-23 and 2023-24. This top up is for Scottish local authorities to distribute to eligible households to help tackle child poverty. These payments help with housing and living costs and are not impacted by the benefit cap.

The problems many Scottish authorities have been having has been identifying households eligible for the DHP top up. For Fife Council, having a tool to help the team distribute DHP effectively was key.

Using the LIFT platform, we have been able to use our administrative datasets to quickly and accurately identify households that were subject to the benefit cap and met the criteria for DHP.

This criteria includes those who were claiming Housing Benefit or the housing element of Universal Credit.

Once identified, we could proactively reach out to invite them to apply for their housing costs to be met.

Using our proactive approach we were able to identify households impacted by the benefit cap. After reaching out, 133 of these eligible households went on to claim DHP. In total, we have distributed £162,215 on benefit cap mitigation between April and November 2023.

Due to customers currently having to complete an application form to receive DHP Ben Cap, we can backdate for six months from the date of the application form being received. As a result, these households have been able to maximise their income and helped to prevent them from falling into further financial difficulty.

On top of this, we also ran two successful Pension Credit campaigns which also increased the uptake of Attendance Allowance (AA).

In total, our Pension Credit campaigns have seen over £860,000 in income generated for 184 households. This includes:

• Almost £536,960 in annual Pension Credit moving forward
• Over £158,310 in backdated Pension Credit
• £165,600 distributed of the £900 Cost of Living payments

The lifetime impact of this for residents is over £3.9 million.

Inviting households to claim Pension Credit also identified other benefit entitlements, with 133 households now claiming Attendance Allowance; an estimated annual gain of £470,980. Over their lifetime this is likely to be over £2,825,880 in additional take up.

Combined, the Pension Credit and Attendance Allowance campaigns have provided an annual gain to households of £1,331,850.

Our plans for next year include increasing uptake of carers allowances, outreach to households in debt, and work on Council Tax reduction for households claiming Universal Credit.