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.