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Connecting support: Why your tenants are falling into arrears and what you can do about it Rising rent arrears, increasing income volatility and upcoming changes to disability benefits are creating new challenges for housing providers and local authorities across the UK.

Recent analysis by Policy in Practice highlights how built in features of the welfare system, such as real time income assessment, benefit deductions and policy reforms, are contributing to financial instability among tenants, particularly those already facing structural barriers like disability, caring responsibilities or single parenthood.

For many low income households, the issue isn’t budgeting, it’s that their income is eroded before it arrives. Over half of Universal Credit recipients are repaying debt through automatic deductions, leaving them short for essentials like rent. Others are impacted by erratic payment cycles or policy shifts, increasing the risk of arrears and even homelessness.

In response, Policy in Practice and Pocket Power have partnered to create a more joined up approach to tenant support. By integrating income maximisation tools with accessible referral routes, housing providers can now take a more holistic and proactive approach to preventing arrears and supporting tenancy sustainment.

Join this webinar to explore:

- The current policy landscape and how it impacts tenant incomes
- How integrated tools like the Better Off Calculator and Pocket Power referral service support a smoother customer journey
- Real world insights from guest housing providers who are using smart software to coordinate applications and reduce repeat data collection

If you're working to improve financial outcomes for tenants and reduce tenancy breakdowns, this session will offer timely, practical insights rooted in current data and frontline experience.

With guest speaker: Helen Burgess, Managing Director, Pocket Power

23/7/2025

10:30am BST

1.3 hours

Understanding the impact of disability benefits reforms on local authorities

27/8/2025

10:30am BST

1.3 hours

Blog

Webinar: How councils can recover from COVID-19

Janet Harkin Published on 05th August 2020

As our thoughts turn to recovery from Covid-19, many households now face potential problem debt. Proactively identifying and targeting support to those who need help most, using all of the insights available, has never been more important.

Listen back to hear:

Key findings from our rapid-response COVID-19 analysis for the Greater London Authority
How a new approach to real-time analytics can support councils with their economic and social recovery plan
What our new future modelling analysis is predicting for both household and council finances

Register now for our next webinar titled How viable is your council tax support scheme? on Wednesday 9 September at 10:30 here.View slides (no audio) here

Case study: Reimagine Debt
Blogpost: Councils get faster data insights to boost their Covid-19 recovery
Analysis: The impact of the COVID-19 Hardship Fund on low- income Londoners
Evidence: The interaction of COVID-19 measures and the Benefit Cap on low-income Londoners
Download: LIFT Dashboard flyer

How Luton Council plans to use data for recovery

The webinar featured a short video interview with Clive Jones, Head of Revenue and Benefits, who discussed how Luton Borough Council is planning their road to recovery from COVID-19 and what role data analysis is playing.It’s been very difficult actually. We’ve not had the privilege to have a view of how much it would spread across the country.

In Luton it’s had a severe impact because of the airport which has effectively been closed since March and so it’s very difficult to plan both the economy and the impact on people’s livelihoods. But with the LIFT we can see our caseload changing and the different types of households that are being impacted by the economic downturns.

This gives us a little bit of an advantage to try and understand how we can reflect our support to match the impact that’s occurring as people move off housing benefit and predominantly on to Universal Credit as they become made redundant.Quite simply we go on and look at the financial resilience in the LIFT. We can see that the number of people on council tax support that have gone into financial crisis increased in April by 45%. That is a massive jump from 2% or 3% in previous months before COVID-19 came along. So the LIFT is actually showing us a significant impact on the financial resilience of our residents and that is before they get into any significant council tax arrears.

So by matching the council tax arrears data with the housing benefit data and our council tax support data we can get a real early insight and that enables our prevention team to call these residents proactively and offer supports whether it be skills and training or even council tax exceptional hardship so that they don’t get into paying more summons fees and more enforcement fees and more debt. So a significant increase in debt being reported through the LIFT Dashboard.Well, it is absolutely vital because we need to see where the trends are going both with our most vulnerable claimants and housing benefit and our council tax arrears data and being able to see which households and what household types predominantly and the impact of whether these are households with children and children living in poverty or whether these are predominantly single or households with couples with no children.

It’s a significant, valuable resource for us to not only to be able to see the changes in patterns of households going in and out of crisis over time, but also the areas of where geospatially this is happening. If there are particular areas like our South Ward which is particularly hard hit, we can then divert resources appropriately to help those communities where we can.

So absolutely essential for our recovery is being able to track and monitor how people are coping. It’s interesting that there are about 3,000 of our residents for instance that we know that are claiming council tax support but are coping financially well. That allows us to be specific with our targeting of resources of help which we wouldn’t be able to do without the LIFT Dashboard.