Data is central to building the case for change. We need to understand how well we’re doing. Policy in Practice is helping us track the outcomes of the people we’ve been working with and compare them to people we’ve not engaged, to evidence the impact of our new approach.
We noticed that we had a fair amount of Discretionary Housing Payment budget left and 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
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
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
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.
Debt is not about numbers, debt is about people, behaviours and circumstances. We fix debt problems by focusing on people.
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.
The LIFT Dashboard 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.
The LIFT Dashboard has allowed us to draw together previously disparate databases into one easily accessible platform. It maps our data against future predicted changes in inflation of household goods and predicted welfare changes and gives the team an easily accessible platform to see what residents’ situations are.
We’ve had a LIFT Dashboard for a year and it’s given us the opportunity to be even more specific with the take up work we’re doing and much smarter in using our resources. Now we’re targeting people who we’re much more confident are likely to be missing out on benefits. In the current climate of having to prioritise resources it’s important to show the results we can get and the impact we can make.
Data is key to enabling us to target those families we know could be hitting crisis point and, without it, we would be working in the dark.
