Ten years as a Marmot city

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.