Luton Council changed its council tax reduction scheme last year and decided to change it again this year. In addition to feedback from the public consultation, data analysis from the council’s LIFT platform gave Members a deeper insight into resident’s situations so they could make a more informed decision. The scheme revisions were accepted.
Luton Council’s biggest good news story from 2020
We have had our revised council tax reduction scheme accepted by elected members. Policy in Practice set the context for members by providing the data modelling. I have an immense amount of data from LIFT that I can present to my Members to help them make decisions. We changed our council tax reduction scheme last year and decided to change the scheme again this year.
We have been able to look at the financial resilience of Luton’s residents in the LIFT platform and, by matching the council tax arrears data with the housing benefit data and our council tax support data, we can get a real and early insight into how our proposals affect residents. This insight enables our prevention team to call these residents proactively and offer support. We have seen a significant increase in debt being reported through the LIFT Platform.
Clive Jones, Head of Revenues and Benefits, Luton Council
Welfare reforms impacted our residents across the board in unique and differing ways. At the time of purchase we needed a tool that would help us better understand the total impact of welfare reforms on all of our residents and the LIFT platform was a natural choice for us.
Covid-19 has made the migration to Universal Credit happen a lot quicker than we had initially planned for. This is also driving the cost change behind Council Tax Reduction.
The LIFT platform has helped us to address these challenges because it models the complete impact of reforms and changes to the welfare system on our cohort of people. It then presents the findings in an easy to use dashboard which is very flexible when we want to filter data.
Using the data LIFT provided for us we have been able to successfully change our Council Tax Reduction Policy twice in the past two years.
Without the LIFT platform I do not know how we would be able to track these households and do preventative work to assist those in crisis.
I wish we had known how many people are migrating to Universal Credit and the impact on household income this would have.
You need to use the LIFT platform to monitor households over the time period to get the best results.
“The LIFT is an essential tool to track household’s income and the impact of welfare reforms, both now and in the future. It shows you the overall situation of the cohort in simple measurements and how this varies over time.”
Clive Jones, Head of Revenues and Benefits, Luton Council