webinar: the postcode lottery of welfare reforms

Policy in PracticeWebinar: The postcode lottery of welfare reform: are you hit hardest?Thursday 26 May 2016

Housekeeping• Audio check• Please ask questions • Polls and a survey• Finish by 11:30

Speakers

Joel RelandPolicy in Practice

Deven GhelaniPolicy in Practice

Agenda• Introduction to Policy in Practice• An overview of our approach• The findings of our benchmarking analysis• The importance of a household level view• The future: Understanding the changing shape of income,

employment and poverty• How we can help

We make the welfare system simple to understand, so that people can make the decisions that are right for them

www.policyinpractice.co.uk

SOFTWAREindividual impact

CONSULTANCYlocal impact

POLICYnational impact

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Over to Joel

Policy in Practice’s approach

Your Housing Benefit / Council Tax data

Our Universal Benefit Calculator

Rich, detailed impact assessment: who is

impacted and what are the Council-wide effects?

1. Use local data and insights to inform better decision making

2. See the impact of different models together with ongoing welfare reforms

3. Better strategic and operational decisions

A word about permissions• We sign a secure data sharing agreement with every client• All personally identifiable information is redacted• A unique reference is kept to enable the client to map our

analysis back to individual households• For our national benchmarking analysis permission was

sought and received from each client, allowing us to use their data in aggregate

• We aggregated SHBE and CTRS data from 13 local authority clients

What is our dataset?• Total sample of 473,562 low-income households• Outlines demographic characteristics of each LA, and

measures the impact of various reforms• Universal Credit• Lower Benefit Cap• LHA Cap & Under-occupation charge

• Grouped into three demographic groups• London Boroughs• Big Cities• Small Cities and Towns

Why does it matter?One of the questions we are asked most often is to know what their peers are doing, and how they are doing relative to others.

• Through this, we are developing national benchmarks to enhance our analysis

• Look at welfare reform bottom-up, in order to map broad national trends

• Understand how different reforms tend to impact different types of local authority

• Use this to predict the likely impact of welfare reform on a local authority

Over to Deven

Every household matters

• We are about to present aggregate analysis of the impact on a local area

• This is helpful, in understanding how different areas are impacted, and the drivers of these impacts, but we have to be careful

• Average scores can mask extremes within boroughs, or wards

• You aren’t able target individual households – Mrs Biggins

What if data could tell you that:

“Mrs Biggins at 73 Acacia Terrace will be affected by all welfare changes by £15.62

per week and she has high barriers to work”

www.policyinpractice.co.uk

Benchmarking for you• By combining national benchmarks and your local,

household-level data, we can tell you where you stand against your peers

• What would you most like to learn if you were able to be benchmarked against your peers?

• Would understanding the impact on individual households be important to you?

• Let us look at the impact two different reforms.

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Let’s look at a data set now

A rich data set, in MS Excel

Who is affected?

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Questions?

We are scratching the surfaceWorking with you, we want to

• Track the impact of reforms on households over time• Combine with other datasets• Develop a real time online dashboard on income, employment and

poverty

Tracking and monitoring • One off snapshots are interesting• But tracking and monitoring over time is much more powerful• Ongoing analysis keeps the information up to date, and take into

account recent policy changes. It can also give you:• A richer picture about each household, including work history,

the impact of past interventions on e.g. arrears• The ability to track the effectiveness of interventions, to help

you to commission the right support to the right people

• So that you can: • make better informed strategic and operational decisions• apply analysis across other service areas (e.g. employment and

skills, adult and children’s services)

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Online dashboardWhat could that look like?

Always available insights

Join our rally cry

• Be at the heart of a data revolution in your local authority• Partner with us so we can learn from you, and we can help you to

learn from each other• Call with one voice for data sharing from DWP• Make the case for your role in local welfare delivery, using clear

headed analysis

Next stepsComplete the automated survey immediately after this webinar to:

1. Request a summary client report2. Request dataset demo3. Request pricing details

We have permission from existing clients to share their reports with other local authorities who may be similar in structure, demographics or strategic vision to your council.

www.policyinpractice.co.uk

Thank you

Deven Ghelanideven@policyinpractice.co.uk07863 560677

hello@policyinpractice.co.uk