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.
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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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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.
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
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 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.
Sally Sanders, Enfield Council
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.
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’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.
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
