Unclaimed benefits: A hidden crisis for local authorities

Here at Broadland District Council and South Norfolk Council, as well as offering our statutory duties as housing and benefits authorities, we also operate a multi-agency ‘Help Hub,’ providing residents with wider and more holistic support and advice, including financial wellbeing.

Both Councils currently use the Policy in Practice’s Low Income Family Tracker (LIFT) dashboard that uses our Benefit customers’ data to identify how individual households are impacted by policy changes.

By analysing the available data, we have estimated that 21,000 of our residents are missing out on unclaimed financial support of approximately £114 million per year. We have used LIFT to identify these customers and have worked with them to get the financial support they are entitled to, ultimately reducing pressure on our core Council services.

After the government’s announcement of the changes to Winter Fuel payments they wrote to us asking for help to support a campaign to increase the uptake of Pension Credit. This is something we had already been actively doing.

Back in 2022, our first project using LIFT was to promote the uptake of Pension Credit and in two years we successfully helped 174 households to claim their entitlement. This had a knock-on effect of providing further financial assistance, including the Warm Homes Discount scheme, free prescriptions, dental treatment and glasses.

Following the government’s call for help we again used LIFT to identify our residents who were entitled to Pension Credit. We contacted them all by phone or in writing and so far, we have helped another 89 residents make a claim in time to receive their Winter Fuel Payments. We have also advised them about other help that is available.

Our local data has proved to be invaluable in helping us ensure that our residents, of all ages, are claiming the benefits they are entitled to. Also, using this wider approach to helping our residents, we have had an 85% success rate in preventing statutory homelessness cases.

However, we believe that there is much more that can be done. The LIFT dashboard has been a vital component in helping us proactively identify our vulnerable residents before they reach crisis levels, and our experience should be seen as an opportunity for Government to accelerate and scale up our success.

We have shown that a data led proactive approach works and now we need ongoing investment to enable us to continue to adopt new technologies that benefit our residents. To help us better target our resources, we also need greater, and easier, data sharing between organisations such as, health or rent arrears data to build a more accurate picture of residents’ vulnerabilities and risk factors.

And following our Help Hub’s one door approach, we need auto enrolment for certain benefits by enabling integrated application processes between local authorities and the DWP. This would remove barriers to receiving help by ensuring some customers would only need to make one application.