Roundtable - Who are the most vulnerable residents in London?

Housekeeping
www.policyinpractice.co.uk
● Audio check
● Please ask questions
● Polls and a survey
● Aim to finish by 16:00
● Slides and recording will automatically follow
● We’re live tweeting via @policy_practice with hashtag #DataForGood

Data-led analysis on Londoners

Today’s speakers
Janet Harkin
Head of
Marketing
Dr Ben Fell
Head of
Analysis
Duncan
Hatfield
Policy and
Operations
Analyst
Deven Ghelani
Director and
founder
Terrin Mathew
Technical Data
Analyst
Tom Shirley
Senior Data
Visualiser

Agenda
14.00 - 14.10 Objectives for the session
14.10 - 14.20 Update: impact of the project
14.20 - 14.40 New analysis: situation going into the COVID-19 crisis
14.40 - 15.00 Real time Living Standards Index for London
15.00 - 15.10 BREAK
15.10 - 15.30 Future: automation, Innovate UK win and modelling 2021
15.30 - 16.00 Q&A Wrap up and next steps

What you wanted to know

● Who is vulnerable and in poverty?
● What is the impact of welfare policies on low income households?
● The impact of housing costs and housing availability?
● The impact of Coronavirus: Real time data management to influence policy
● Planning for recovery and predicting future service need
● The outlook for poverty across London and what other councils are doing?
We hope you leave with a strong sense of the value of the project, and wanting to
support us to do more to help you recover from the pandemic.
What you wanted to know

Poll 1: What is most important to you?

Over to Ben
Update: Impact of the project

Impact: Rapid Covid-19 analysis
Data from the TFL project allowed us to provide
rapid-response analysis to the COVID-19 crisis
● The Chancellor’s response to Coronavirus
● Analysis on the impacts of the benefit cap
and April 2020 benefits changes
● Analysis on the impact of the COVID-19
Hardship Fund
● Individualised reports to all participating
authorities on their local impacts

Impact: Localised findings
www.policyinpractice.co.uk/hardship-fund
● Localised research findings
created for participating
London Boroughs
● Analysis on Hardship fund
allocations scaled to be
nationally representative

Impact: Key findings of analysis for GLA
● The number of households affected by the benefit cap would double overnight
due to the benefit increases (to LHA rates, UC and tax credits)
● Households already subject to the benefit cap are missing out on more than
£400/month of benefit income on average after the changes
● The impact of the hardship fund is differs dramatically depending on the
generosity of local council tax support scheme

Impact: influence gained
● National media coverage in The
Observer and Private Eye
● Delivered as evidence to Work and
Pension Select Committee and
shadow cabinet
● Follow up research activity with
Crisis to provide national estimates

Over to Duncan
New analysis: situation going into the
COVID-19 crisis

Data from 20 London boroughs since 2016

Living standards declined from 2016 to 2019
Cash shortfall is when a
household’s expected costs
exceed their take-home
income.
In less than four years, the
proportion of working-age
low-income Londoners who
are in cash shortfall has
increased significantly.

Those impacted by welfare reforms fared worst

Lone parents out of work were badly hit
● We found that many of the groups most likely to be in cash shortfall are those
hit by more than one welfare reform
● For instance, lone parents out of work were disproportionately likely to be
impacted by the two-child-limit, the benefit cap, and have moved to UC
● In 2016, 22% were in cash shortfall
● By 2019, 38% were now struggling to make ends meet
● And recent research shows lone parents are among the worst hit financially
by COVID-19...

How did April’s Covid-19 reforms change things?
● We modelled data to April 2020 so
we could assess impact of reforms
● Shows a big boost to low-income
Londoner’s incomes
● 7% of households moving out of
cash shortfall as a result of the
boost to UC, tax credits and LHA

To get the full picture, new data will be crucial
● Our data as modelled does not account for:
○ the new cohort - massive rises in those on Universal Credit
○ changes in employment patterns - rising unemployment/furlough
○ the impact of lockdown on incomes
● With regular monthly updates from each of you, we will be able to analyse all
of this and more...

Your questions for our speakers

Over to Tom and Terrin
Refreshed Living Standards Index for
London

Refreshed Living Standards Index for London
www.policyinpractice.co.uk/lsi-london
We have updated the LSI dashboards to;
1. Improve the general style and usability
2. Include more up-to-date data for the existing measures, although
currently it is showing the picture before Covid-19
3. Add new insights around housing affordability for households who rent
Today we have three animated slides which briefly demonstrate the new work.

Update: the Living Standards Index for London
www.policyinpractice.co.uk/lsi-london
We will provide a link at the end so you can look yourself - but please put any
questions in the chat as we go along and we can respond to those.
Later in the presentation Ben is going to talk through some exciting future
analysis that we are already exploring with clients of our LIFT dashboards.
When looking at the dashboards please begin thinking about any additional
analysis that you would find useful.
We are particularly interested to hear specific use cases you may have for this
sort of data to make it actionable in helping with the challenges you face.

Updated style
for better
usability
● Buttons instead of
tabs to change pages
● Clicks instead of
dropdowns
● Content rearranged
● Click into boroughs
e.g. Redbridge Cash
Shortfall

New measure
on Borough
Explorer page
Added a measure for
the percentage of
low-income London
renters who spend
more than 30% of their
income on rent. e.g.
Disparities in
Greenwich

New page for
housing
affordability
Added page in
similar style to
existing ones to give
top line introduction
and then compare
social rented sector
to the private rented
sector

New page for housing affordability
● 39% of income spent on rent. 32% in SRS, 51% in PRS.
● In PRS nearly fifth of households being put in cash shortfall due to
the gap between their housing benefit and rent.

Some specific insights on updated LSI dashboards
● Financial resilience: We can
benchmark the impacts across
London. Around 20% of low income
households are now in cash
shortfall.
● Universal Credit: Higher
percentage of people projected to
be better off now than previous
time point (Jan 2018)

Take a break
Play with the new LSI and post your
questions in the chat
See you back here at 3.10

Poll 2: What are you currently doing to
mitigate the impacts of the pandemic?

Over to Deven and Terrin
Future roadmap: automation and
Innovate UK

Real-time analytics & benchmarking across London
Secure, scalable, real-time updates:
● Monthly updates to the LSI dashboard
● Potentially track cross borough movement
● Save time for your analysts
● Improve security of the data and its use
For LIFT clients
● Detailed analysis on new cohorts
● Outcome tracker to evaluate trajectories

● Scheduled jobs for the extraction of datasets from your systems
● Secure transfer to our server, automatic redaction of datasets
● Data prepared and uploaded to Policy in Practice database
● Data published to the LSI on the same day each month
● Analysis on future scenarios included at a pan-London level
Automation and Innovate UK
“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.”
Mark Fowler, Community Solutions Director, LB Barking and Dagenham

Your questions for our speaker

Over to Ben
Roadmap: Recovery tracking & future
modelling

Roadmap: Future modelling
LIFT clients have told us you need to know:
● What is happening to your current claimants
● Who the new cohort are, and how are they different
● What the impact on your services next year will be
… what else do you need to know about low-income Londoners?

What is happening to your current claimants?
1. ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ case scenarios
2. User-defined scenario modelling

Who are the new cohort, and how are they different?
1. Isolate new claims since April as a filter for LIFT users
2. Provide demographic comparisons by ward / borough on LSI

What is the impact on our services next year?
1. ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ case scenarios
2. Regular updates to LIFT and LSI with latest published projections

Questions and feedback:
● What indicators best track your borough’s route to recovery?
● What future projections would best support your strategic planning?
● What have we missed?

Poll 3: Would you like to benchmark the
impacts in your council against other
boroughs on a monthly basis?

Wrap up and next steps

COVID-19: A secure, scalable platform for UC data
Councils are losing Housing Benefit data, and currently get UC
data on households claiming council tax, around half of the UC
cohort.
Greenwich wrote to DWP asking for data on all UC recipients to
be shared with local councils, to deliver targeted support to
prevent crisis and promote recovery - particularly relevant in light
of Coronavirus.
However, councils are currently dependent on the 'big three'
software providers to manage this data from DWP. This proposal
would develop a secure approach to working with this data that
could be scaled to other partners.
If the DWP decides not to share additional UC data, the benefits
of this project will allow councils to use the data up to six weeks
earlier than now.

Wrap up and next steps
● We’ll publish the LSI report and dashboard in mid July
● We’ll be in touch about automation
● Thank you for your support, together we’ll work to get UC data released

Thank you
hello@policyinpractice.co.uk
020 3239 5579

Roundtable - Who are the most vulnerable residents in London?

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