With guest speaker Sharon Warner, Head of Welfare, Bracknell Forest Council
On demand webinar
Data driven success: From tackling homelessness to unlocking £1m income and recovering over £550k of debt
29 May
View the webinar
More families struggled to pay their rent after COVID-19 and, as a result, Bracknell Forest Council saw an increase of 750% in the number of families who approached as homeless, up from 120 to 909 in four years.
The council initially bought Policy in Practice’s LIFT platform in 2021 to tackle rising homelessness.
Using LIFT, the council harnessed the power of its administrative data to identify residents for support. Notable campaigns include the timely allocation of over £4,000 in Discretionary Housing Payments and over £8,000 in emergency support to 31 households.
But household financial health took another hit from the cost of living crisis and, by March 2022, two in ten families found paying bills a burden and were regularly in arrears.
A proactive shift by a council officer extended LIFT’s data driven approach from the homelessness team to other departments, with great results.
The LIFT approach had proven its ability to identify residents at risk and allocate scarce resources. With more demand for council services, LIFT offered a way to give preventative support at scale across the borough.
Listen back to hear
- The national context and focussing on our new report – How £23 billion of income related benefits and social tariffs goes unclaimed every year
- Bracknell Forest Council case study – From tackling homelessness to unlocking £1m income and recovering over £550k of debt
- More information about LIFT, our Low Income Family Tracker, focussing on how LIFT can be used to identify vulnerable people and target support
- Questions and answers with our panel
Listen back to our speakers
£23 billion in support goes unclaimed. So we've got issues, but we've actually got a really good way of solving some of these issues and that's tapping into that unclaimed support. Around £750,000,000 has been put back into people's pockets through targeted campaigns, using LIFT and the Better Off Calculator. We are making a dent in this.
We've secured over £780,000 worth of income for residents through a variety of different forms of benefits, the largest being Pension Credit. When you've been in benefits for a long time, you don't always hear the good and my team hear the good daily. I'm really grateful when they tell me stuff that the difference that we are making to people.
The cost to local authorities for each homelessness case can be anywhere up to and beyond £15,000 in cost. So even a small campaign using LIFT can save a local authority hundreds of thousands, in cost avoidance.
