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The LGR playbook: Stabilising services, modelling council tax and allocating Crisis and Resilience Funding Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) presents merging authorities with two challenges: harmonising conflicting Council Tax Reduction (CTR) schemes without worsening Britain's record £9.3bn council tax debt (up 12% since last year) and allocating the DWP’s new Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF), all the while maintaining vital support during the transition.

This webinar will provide an LGR success blueprint. Learn how to run a dedicated Council Tax modelling project to design your CTR scheme and leverage the LIFT (Low Income Family Tracker) dashboard to combine datasets.

Join us to hear from local authority speakers, including Nikitta Vanterpool, Anti Poverty Strategic Lead at Cambridgeshire County Council.

We will discuss two crucial elements for transitioning authorities:

1. Harmonising CTR
Merging rules without forecasting impact threatens collection rates and causes income shocks. Before altering policies, councils can use cross-boundary data to simulate banded schemes, model resident financial impacts and protect revenues before going live.

2. Allocating CRF
Learn how local authorities have combined legacy data for a unified view of poverty, enabling:
• Proactive allocation: Based on frameworks that distributed over £18.5 million in Household Support Funds (HSF), councils can automate allocation. Filter for households in deep precarity to distribute grants directly with zero paperwork.
• Designing services: Identify precise pockets of need, allowing teams to deploy targeted, long-term support programmes from day one.

By attending this session, you will learn how to:
• De-risk CTR changes: Test schemes to find one fit for purpose with a dedicated modelling project.
• Maintain service continuity through LGR: Combine data so teams never lose visibility of households.
• Replicate HSF success for CRF: Shift from reactive applications to automated distribution and get the funding to residents faster.
• Design future support: Use comprehensive insights to design effective, targeted welfare programmes