Category

• Emerging Local Practice

---

Poverty impact

• Mitigation

---

Poverty driver

• Increase income from benefits

---

Keywords

• Research, Data and Evaluation

Aim

The aims of the project are to use data to help identify households in need of financial support and to maximise the effectiveness of the Council’s resources.

Summary

The project strives to identify unmet need in Argyll and Bute, informing the Council’s work to target existing resources towards tackling poverty. It is a pilot project, involving four schools that will soon merge into two schools. It uses additional CACI datasets and overlays these with existing council and DWP information to help identify pockets of unmet and unsupported need. It will then inform the actions of Argyll and Bute Council’s Welfare Rights officers. It is structured in two stages:

Stage 1: Evaluate the quality of the CACI data by comparing it with other datasets internal and external to the Council. If successful, the project will progress to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Evaluate the impact of this targeted approach, informed by the CACI data, to gauge if the approach was successful or not.

The intent is to scale up the project to include schools. However, the Stage 1 data quality evaluation requirements were not met and so the project did not advance to impact evaluation.

What difference does it make?

Too early to determine.

Key take-aways

• Always consider the accuracy of third-party data.

 

Organisations

Argyll and Bute Council, the Scottish Government, the Improvement Service, NHS Highland, and CACI (Consumer & Demographic Data Segmentation Solutions).

Location

Argyll and Bute

Contact