Folkestone and Hythe District Council have awarded over £1.1 million to their most vulnerable customers to help with payments towards council tax. They use the LIFT platform to identify those most in need and then target vital support where it is most needed
Folkestone and Hythe’s good news story from 2020
“At Folkestone and Hythe we look after around 52,000 dwellings and process around 8,000 housing and benefit claims. Since receiving the LIFT platform we have used our data to work on a range of campaigns, starting with our mixed-age pension credit campaign, with great success.
Most recently, we identified people who were receiving Universal Credit but not council tax reduction. Since identifying this group of households we have been successful in awarding over £1.1 million to help with payments towards council tax, focusing on our most vulnerable residents first. Having the LIFT platform also means that we have been able to identify those people new to the benefit system, as they often need the most support as they transition to Universal Credit.“
Nick Harvey, Specialist Training Officer, Folkestone and Hythe District Council
We needed a way to identify vulnerable customers and proactively contact them before they got into further debt.
Due to COVID-19 we have seen many more vulnerable customers. The introduction of furlough has brought its own challenges and we have not been able to see customers face to face. As such, we have seen a lack of official recovery.
The LIFT platform made it easy for us to identify customers whose income had decreased, using our own data. We could therefore contact the customers who were experiencing serious financial difficulty before they got into worse trouble.
We contacted our self-employed customers to make sure they were claiming all the benefits they are entitled to. We have also used LIFT to contact people aged over 75 to make sure they were getting pension credit. We’re very much looking forward to reviewing the results of that work soon.
Our LIFT platform has been instrumental in identifying customers who are experiencing financial difficulty and vulnerability. We would not have been able to contact anywhere near those numbers without this software. During the first lockdown we moved our resources around using the LIFT platform, for example, we gave lists of self-employed households to our Visiting Officers (who weren’t allowed to visit) so they could contact those customers to help them maximise their income while the country was shut down.
How big a part the COVID pandemic would affect all we do. We were very lucky to have both the LIFT platform and the Benefit and Budget Calculator in our council so we could quickly and easily identify people who needed our help. If I could go back in time, I really wish we’d been at a stage to get monthly updates from our data at the beginning of the year. At the time of COVID, we were working on data that was three months old; it’s so much better now having monthly updates. It means we can nip problems in the bud before they get a chance to multiply.
Just that at the moment the country seems to be coping fairly well with the financial situation. The really hard work is going to begin next year when furlough ends, unemployment goes up and wage freezes begin to bite. Now is the time to get the systems up and running so you can plan and analyse for the rainy day that is most definitely on the horizon (sorry to end it on a down note!)
I work in the Revenues and Benefits Department for the local District Council. Policy in Practice and two of their products we have purchased, the Low Income Family Tracker and The Benefits and Budget Calculator, have been vital in helping us react to COVID-19s. With their help and expertise we have been able to identify and reach out to many of our customers who otherwise may have fallen through the cracks. Thanks to Policy in Practice we now have monthly updates of our LIFT so we can stop problems before they occur, and thanks to their tireless efforts the calculator has been always kept up to date with the massive changes that have happened in the benefits sector. Having Policy in Practice work with us has had a massive effect on where we can focus our resources to help the maximum amount of people. Thank you Deven and the team.
Nick Harvey, Specialist Training Officer, Folkestone and Hythe District Council