LIFT has given us the opportunity to be even more targeted with the take up work we’re doing and become much smarter in using our resources. Now we’re targeting people who we are much more confident are likely to be missing out on benefits.
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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.
The LIFT Dashboard allows Cornwall Council to take a more focused approach to assisting those impacted by welfare reforms, and improves on our previous, slightly scattergun, approach. This extra focus allows us to have a greater impact on vulnerable residents in Cornwall without increasing resources.
We asked Policy in Practice to help us model our Council Tax Support scheme to give Members confidence that all options to reduce cost while supporting residents were covered. We also wanted to learn from other LAs who’ve already rolled out UC and we knew an external consultant was the best way to do that.
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.
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.
I wanted to illustrate that you can use data for good and that it can make a difference to both the community and the council’s bottom line.
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’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.
Previously we took data from different systems and manually tried to identify those who needed support or we just put a form to apply for support on our website. But we wanted to identify those people who 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