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.
Previously we took data from different systems and manually tried to identify those that needed support. Or we just put a form to apply for support on our website. But we wanted to identify those people that 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)
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
Using LIFT, we have already identified 299 cases in fuel, water and food poverty and in crisis, at risk or struggling. We are able to tailor support depending on each individual circumstances and people are pleasantly surprised that we are calling to help.
Jane Worrell, Folkestone and Hythe District Council
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
One of the things that I like about the LIFT dashboard is that you can narrow it down into very specific groups or cohorts and look at the types of issues that need to be addressed from the perspective of the residents.
Amma Antwi-Yeboah, London Borough of Redbridge
We’ve only had the LIFT dashboard for about 18 months but it’s invaluable. We can get so much data from it that we can provide to members who may have concerns within their ward and it’s the baseline start for all of our campaigns.
Dawn Cove, London Borough of Redbridge
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 households identified by LIFT as at risk was behind in their council tax, tax debt, and they had liability orders. Because of the money that we were able to get for them, they cleared 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.
