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.
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Proactively support people and predict future demand
We want to move beyond sticking plaster solutions. If we can promote work and independence by understanding who’s impacted by welfare reforms we’ll have more resources available for those who still need our support.
With your anonymised data sets and our software we show how individual households are affected by cumulative and aggregate welfare reforms, now and in the future.
Use the information to make objective decisions, allocate budgets, explain the real picture to stakeholders and plan how to mitigate negative impacts on families.
We have recently purchased the discretionary housing payment module from Policy in Practice. We will be expecting our housing and voluntary sector partners to use the calculator when they make the DHP applications. That’s going to really speed up our decision making and be really useful to those partners because they will be able to give people a really good idea of whether they are likely to get something from us.
Working with Policy in Practice has been a game changer for us. I have proven that the recommendations you gave in our Policy Impact Analysis have achieved results. You were absolutely on the money.
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.
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
The high-level, astonishing figures in the Policy Impact Analysis report allowed us to highlight the need for continued welfare resources to elected members and other local decision-makers.
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.
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
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
Working with Policy in Practice, we have used the information to develop the right tools and new practices to create an early intervention and prevention approach that makes a real difference for our residents going through hard times.