We want to move beyond sticking plaster solutions. If we can promote work and independence by understanding who’s impacted by welfare reforms we’ll have more resources available for those who still need our support.
With your anonymised data sets and our software we show how individual households are affected by cumulative and aggregate welfare reforms, now and in the future.
Use the information to make objective decisions, allocate budgets, explain the real picture to stakeholders and plan how to mitigate negative impacts on families.
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Policy in Practice’s detailed and powerful analysis pointed us in the right direction and has been the main driver of the changes we’ve made to our Council Tax Reduction scheme, and the levels of support we’ve been able to build into it.
We have recently purchased the discretionary housing payment module from Policy in Practice. We will be expecting our housing and voluntary sector partners to use the calculator when they make the DHP applications. That’s going to really speed up our decision making and be really useful to those partners because they will be able to give people a really good idea of whether they are likely to get something from us.
The LIFT Dashboard has allowed us to draw together previously disparate databases into one easily accessible platform. It maps our data against future predicted changes in inflation of household goods and predicted welfare changes and gives the team an easily accessible platform to see what residents’ situations are.
At North Hertfordshire District Council we wanted to spend more of our budget on council tax support whilst making sure we factored in the effects of welfare reforms. Policy in Practice helped us to accurately model our best CTRS scheme and establish the ideal level
The LIFT Dashboard has been invaluable in helping us help our customers to maximise their income and helping the most vulnerable of the people in our district to help themselves. One household identified as at risk by the LIFT dashboard was behind with their council tax and they had liability orders. Because of the money we were able to get for them they cleared out the old debt and they are now paid to debt for 2019 and 2020.
The LIFT Dashboard allows Cornwall Council to take a more focused approach to assisting those impacted by welfare reforms, and improves on our previous, slightly scattergun, approach. This extra focus allows us to have a greater impact on vulnerable residents in Cornwall without increasing resources.
The high-level, astonishing figures in the Policy Impact Analysis report allowed us to highlight the need for continued welfare resources to elected members and other local decision-makers.
We asked Policy in Practice to help us model our Council Tax Support scheme to give Members confidence that all options to reduce cost while supporting residents were covered. We also wanted to learn from other LAs who’ve already rolled out UC and we knew an external consultant was the best way to do that.
I wanted to illustrate that you can use data for good and that it can make a difference to both the community and the council’s bottom line.
The more timely your data, the more powerful it is. If you want to operationalise the information you’re using it’s absolutely critical that the data is timely.
The Policy in Practice LIFT Dashboard has allowed us to draw together previously disparate databases into one easily accessible platform. It maps our data against future predicted changes in inflation of household goods and predicted welfare changes and gives the team an easily accessible platform to see what residents’ situations are.
We’ve had a LIFT Dashboard for a year and it’s given us the opportunity to be even more specific with the take up work we’re doing and much smarter in using our resources. Now we’re targeting people who we’re much more confident are likely to be missing out on benefits. In the current climate of having to prioritise resources it’s important to show the results we can get and the impact we can make.
Data is central to building the case for change. We need to understand how well we’re doing. Policy in Practice is helping us track the outcomes of the people we’ve been working with and compare them to people we’ve not engaged, to evidence the impact of our new approach.
With LIFT we can see our caseload changing and the different types of households that are being impacted by the economic downturns. This lets us understand how we can reflect our support to match the impact that’s occurring as people move off housing benefit and predominantly onto Universal Credit as they become made redundant. We can be specific with our targeting of resources of help, which we wouldn’t be able to do without the LIFT Dashboard.
Clive Jones, Luton Borough Council
Working with Policy in Practice, we have used the information to develop the right tools and new practices to create an early intervention and prevention approach that makes a real difference for our residents going through hard times.
I can’t see whether the people being clobbered by reductions in council tax support or under-occupation are the same people that have been clobbered by other reforms.
Faced with a big funding gap Lambeth must make cost reductions. We commissioned Policy in Practice to give us clear, trustworthy information to evaluate proposed CTS scheme options and consult with affected groups. They’ve done this and more, by also showing us where our welfare support can be best targeted.
One of the first people to record was a household that was identified by the LIFT dashboard at risk. They were behind in their council tax, tax debt, they had liability orders and because of the money that we were able to get for them, that cleared out the old debt and they are now currently paid to debt for 2019 and 2020.
Nick Harvey and Jane Worrell, Folkestone and Hythe District Council
Working with Policy in Practice has been a game changer for us. I have proven that the recommendations you gave in our Policy Impact Analysis have achieved results. You were absolutely on the money.
Data is key to enabling us to target those families we know could be hitting crisis point and, without it, we would be working in the dark.
Universal Credit roll out meant the cost of administering our council tax support scheme was becoming unsustainable. Policy in Practice’s modelling gave us the data our Members needed to understand the risk of ‘doing nothing’. They were able to agree to an amended scheme that will deliver a cost neutral solution for 2019/20 and minimise the impact on our most vulnerable customers.
Working with Policy in Practice, we have developed the LIFT Dashboard to help us build on our early intervention and prevention approaches enabling proactive targeting that makes a real difference for our residents going through hard times.
We want to move beyond sticking plaster solutions. If we can promote work and independence by understanding who’s impacted by welfare reforms we’ll have more resources available for those who still need our support.
Policy in Practice provided much deeper analysis of our data than we can do in the local authority. Their data is useful, they gave us graphs, highlights and visualisations that brings the messages to life and helps with that decision making.
The reason we were able to get to the scheme that we finally got to was due to the depth of the analysis that was carried out by Policy in Practice on our behalf, and it was a massive help.
I’m proud to say that over the past couple of years the team have helped over 4,000 households which we’re able to evidence through the LIFT Dashboard.
This is really rich analysis. People can have a tendency to think of that as abstract, a nice-to-have, but it’s really powerful. This is useful for intervening with particular families and households so we can, in theory and in practice, identify those households that are being put at risk of being at risk because of the two child limit or because of the move to Universal Credit.
We needed to put CTRS scheme options together quickly. Policy in Practice won because of their clear and unique approach, experience, detailed understanding of welfare reform impacts and excellent team. The fact that the work has been produced in such a short space of time, and to such high quality standards, is particularly impressive.
