Supporting low-income families

This project, for Policy in Practice, is primarily redesigning elements of their widely used LIFT platform. The Low-Income Families Tracker is a paid-for suite of insight reports for staff in local government. It visualises outputs from the Policy in Practice analytics engine. This can apply national and local welfare policy, both existing and upcoming, in order to give deep insight into how individual families will be impacted and therefore the best ways to support them.

 

As examples the engine can assess whether each family will be better or worse-off when they transition to Universal Credit. It also uses income data and known or modelled expenditure to analyse net income after costs. A council support team can then target the households who are already in a cash shortfall and are also due to be worse-off under the new public policies to ensure this transition does not result in a crisis for the family.

 

Illustrating Impact are supporting Policy in Practice to transition this powerful tool to a format that is even more accessible, allowing staff to make action plans and then track the impact of their work. Several new dashboards have been launched and more are in the design and feedback phase.

 

We are also supporting Policy in Practice to deliver other projects for their clients such as the ‘Living Standards Index for London’ for the Trust for London. This is an openly available piece of analysis that is being continually developed to give new insight into different challenges facing low-income Londoners.

 

We hope to continue doing projects for Policy in Practice as they expand their team and do brilliant work for more and more councils to help them support their residents effectively.