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 platform lets you identify the
so you can get the right support to those
LIFT lets you explore your data over time
You can identify people in danger of crisis before it hits and target support where it will be most effective, preventing hardship. Then track changes to see which of your activities are working.
Administrative datasets can yield powerful insights that give a fuller picture, and help drive change. LIFT allows local authorities to combine their datasets with our policy engine to make better decisions.
You can see how individual households are impacted by policy changes, now and in the future. Use the information to identify the most vulnerable families, target support to them, and track the change.
Our local authority clients use
LIFT to:
- Tackle problem debt and arrears
- Maximise the income of households
- Evidence return on investment in support
- Identify and support families at risk of eviction
- Avoid unnecessary cost by preventing hardship
- Limit and mitigate the local impact of COVID-19
- Understand current and future demand for services
Features of the LIFT platform
Functions of the LIFT platform
LIFT has revolutionised the way we work and propelled the amount of support we can offer our customers. Using LIFT, we have assisted 3,482 households which included 4,860 children. This past year we have assisted our residents to claim an additional £7 million of unclaimed benefits which helps them individually and also helps our borough.
Julian Clift, Sutton Council
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.
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 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.
We used LIFT to target those who should be eligible for a DHP. In November we had 26 applications for DHP with 22 awarded and in December we had 72 applications and 62 awards. So our numbers reflect that the campaign did have an effect with maximizing people’s income.
Nick Harvey, Folkestone and Hythe District Council
There’s nothing more satisfying than knowing that we’ve identified an issue and can tell the story of what we’ve done to help. Recently, the LIFT platform identified that we have 5,187 households estimated to be in food poverty.
Margaret Gallagher
Head of Performance & Business Intelligence
LIFT has given us the opportunity to be even more targeted with the take up work we’re doing and become much smarter in using our resources. Now we’re targeting people who we are much more confident are likely to be missing out on benefits.
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.
Previously we took data from different systems and manually tried to identify those who needed support or we just put a form to apply for support on our website. But we wanted to identify those people who were in crisis, to be proactive rather than reactive. LIFT allowed us to move away from the traditional approach and run highly targeted campaigns. Within a fortnight, we had identified 100 vulnerable households and supported 95 of them.
Pat Knight
Service Manager (Revenues and Benefits)
