Ensure a healthy standard of living for all - Print version

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This priority focuses on:

  1. Supporting Coventry residents to be financially resilient.
  2. Identifying and targeting interventions to those who are disproportionately affected by low income and who are most at risk of financial crisis, and target interventions at an early stage.
  3. Enabling all Coventry residents to have equal opportunities to access digital technologies, services and supports in a way that helps them in their daily lives.
  4. Increasing earlier identification of issues and opportunities for prevention or early help, and to enable the delivery of integrated support and services, through a locality approach.

Background

The Marmot Review highlighted that having insufficient money to lead a healthy life creates significant health inequalities, leads to poorer health outcomes, and impacts life expectancy for some people.

The Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) showed that poverty and low living standards are powerful determinants of ill health and health inequity (Fair Society, Healthy Lives 2010). Poverty may be defined in different ways and there is no single, universally accepted definition.

Poverty is an issue which cannot be addressed by any one organisation or sector. We are planning to work with partners across the city to develop a strategic approach to both break the cycle of poverty and mitigate against the harm caused by poverty.

In today’s society, digital exclusion can be seen as a form of inequality. There is a close correlation between digital exclusion and social disadvantages including lower income, lower levels of education, and poor housing. Coventry City Council are planning to work with partners to embed digital and health literacy within their services so that all Coventry residents have equal access to digital technology and services; improve digital access, reducing the barriers to digital inclusion.

What we know

There are a number of programmes of work and activities that support the ensure a healthy standard of living for all recommendation. These include:

  1. Support Coventry residents to be financially resilient.
  2. Identify and target interventions using the low-income family tracker tool to maximise benefit entitlement and income.
  3. Understand our community’s local needs to support our residents to utilise digital systems to access digital support interventions and opportunities to maximise their income across the social gradient.
  4. Improve the tools and approaches to engage people in support interventions to reduce long-term unemployment early across the social gradient including people living in poverty due to health and disability-related barriers to labour market access to support people to stay in work.
  5. Work in partnership to support our residents that are disproportionately affected by fuel and food poverty with targeted interventions through the cost of living campaign.
  6. Improve the energy efficiency of housing stock.
  7. Improve the food environment with a connected system that allows access to food.

Legislation, Government guidance that support the ensure a healthy standard of living for all recommendation:

Links to service developments and strategies that support this recommendation:

Indicators

The indicators below will tell us how we are progressing:

  • Proportion of households with low income
  • Children in low-income households
  • Digital Inclusion

Our services and activities:

Our delivery partners:

  • Act on Energy
  • #CovConnects
  • Coventry City Council Adult Education Service
  • Coventry City Council Children and Education Service
  • Coventry City Council Migration Team
  • Coventry City Council Planning Team
  • Coventry City Council Public Health Team
  • Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care System
  • Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)
  • E. ON
  • Job Shop
  • Voluntary, Community, Social Enterprise Sector
  • West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS)

How we will measure progress

  • No's of embedded Digital Champions within GPs, PCNs and community organisations who are championing digital health
  • No of data and device distribution banks (could ask for a postcode/ locality area G.P, VCSE and council)
  • LIFT (Low Income Family Tracker) tool data and real-life case studies
  • Coventry Food Networks data
  • Data from the energy crisis hotspots map (places where income is below average, but energy bills are higher than average due to poor housing)
  • West Midlands Fire Service information

Case Study 1 - Central England Law Centre: Free school meals for families with no recourse to public funds

As a Marmot city, Coventry was taking action to tackle health inequalities, by supporting families with no recourse to public funds, a group known to be facing inequalities to claim free school meals. This work supports many of the Marmot Principles. The action taken is a best practice example of how partners can work together to break down barriers and support children to access their entitlement to a free school meal and support system improvements and accessibility.

No recourse to public funds (NRPF) applies to a person who is 'subject to immigration control' in the UK and has no entitlement to welfare benefits or public housing. Public Funds include but are not limited to:

  • Housing Benefit.
  • Jobseeker's Allowance.
  • Personal Independence Payment.
  • Universal Credit.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government temporarily lifted the restriction on families who had no recourse to public funds status receiving free school meals. This change was not widely communicated and the process by which schools and local authorities could make these claims unclear. Central England Law Centre (CELC) advocated heavily for individual families to receive these free meals and opened a continual dialogue and challenge with local authority officers and practitioners during the pandemic to ensure rights were met.

Post-pandemic these rights were permanently extended but it quickly became clear that they were widely misunderstood. CELC set about ensuring in Coventry this could be improved. Working with the Marmot Partnership we presented information about entitlement and access, but it wasn’t enough. These discussions highlighted a misunderstanding about those with no recourse to public fund condition - a group facing some of the greatest inequalities. We determined that as schools were the designated authoriser of this process, they needed specialist support.

We ran a webinar with headteachers and produced a ‘dinner plate’ themed poster to promote this entitlement. We encouraged the local authority to update its web pages and include specific instructions and later translated materials that allowed those with NRPF to understand their rights and make the correct application.

We used our partnerships to ensure everyone supporting families; social workers, migration team, early help workers, schools, community organisations, food banks, social supermarkets, and youth organisations all knew and understood this right.

Successes

This activity provided a wider lens on the inequalities facing those with NRPF in Coventry and we used a similar approach to get better access and help for families who are NRPF to the Holiday Activities Fund and highlight barriers of language.

For more information on the free school meals for families with no recourse to public funds project visit the CELC website. [https://www.centralenglandlc.org.uk/]

Case Study 2 - Lifting families out of poverty through targeted rights-based help. Families subject to the Benefit Cap

As a Marmot city, Coventry takes action to tackle health inequalities, by supporting households with low financial resilience.

In late 2018, the Marmot Partnership promoted the Low Income Family Tracker (LIFT) Platform for Coventry City Council (CCC) to support our Marmot priorities. The LIFT is an interactive tool that allows local authorities to identify and support households with low financial resilience.

The LIFT Tool combines comprehensive welfare policy analysis with local authority data to identify residents and families in areas of deprivation who were likely to be entitled to certain benefits that they may not be claiming. The platform helps its users design appropriate interventions, including communication via post, followed by a more targeted intervention of telephone contact to those who may need to be supported to make a claim and track the effectiveness.

After CCC purchased the platform, the Central England Law Centre (CELC) joined the operation group to introduce welfare benefits expertise. CELC believed that by introducing welfare benefits expertise into Coventry City Council’s LIFT programme, design, targeted improvements for many of the people seeking their support could be achieved. An opportunity was quickly identified to use data to identify families unfairly affected by the benefit cap and provide legal advice to remove the cap. Many local authorities outside Coventry encouraged benefits-capped families to work more hours to lift the cap. However, there are often more suitable exemptions related to health conditions and disabilities.

An estimated £23 billion in benefits goes unclaimed annually due to stigma and system complexities. CELC highlighted that many families could be exempt if offered specialist triage to identify unclaimed entitlements. CCC agreed to use the LIFT dashboard with CELC’s expertise to identify clients who could have the cap removed.

In 2022/23, we piloted a model using the LIFT dashboard to identify Coventry families impacted by the benefit cap, receiving Discretionary Housing Payments, and having large families. With their consent, CELC provided independent legal advice. The pilot triaged 21 families - these included considerations of working hours but also sought to understand previous working periods, caring responsibilities, and health conditions. Following specialist advice and casework, 15 families were successful in removing the cap. This removed the need for ongoing discretionary housing payments, significantly increased household incomes, and supported families struggling to access missed entitlements to support. The route to remove the cap is not always a quick intervention and CELC worked with partners to ensure holistic help was offered to families facing difficulties whilst they worked to lift the cap. Many of the families had tried to access welfare benefits but failed to advocate successfully for themselves without specialist support.

Successes

Key outcomes:

  • Average weekly benefit increase: £374.50
  • Average lump sum payment: £19,872

With two years of funding from the Coventry Building Society, CELC will continue using the LIFT dashboard to identify and support families, alleviating poverty in Coventry.

CELC's strategic involvement continues to push for the use of LIFT so that it targets those facing the greatest inequalities for example:

  • Focusing on those who the data suggested are missing Severe Disability Premium ahead of tax credit migration.
  • Use the data to support anyone subject to a sanction of their benefits by the Department for Work and Pensions to raise a challenge if they feel that sanction was unfair enabling them to have their benefits repaid to them.
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