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Tooltype: Interactive Dashboard
Organisation: Improvement Service
Contact: research@improvementservice.org.uk
Purpose
The West Lothian Unmet Need dashboard is an interactive tool for allowing council officers to identify areas at data zone level where there is unmet need defined as unclaimed benefits or low levels of service take-up. Insights gained from the dashboard can support in planning resource allocation and targeting interventions to improve uptake. The dashboard is the key deliverable in a collaboration between the Improvement Service and West Lothian Council as part of a project funded through the Child Poverty Accelerator Fund. The longer term aim is to scale up the dashboard for use by other councils.
Content
The data used in the tool is a mix of council held and publicly available data. Currently, the tool uses datasets to show uptake rates for Free School Meals, School Clothing Grant, Educational Maintenance Allowance, Universal Credit for households with children, and Money and Welfare advice. Each dataset is compared against an indicator of demand, children in low-income families for example, which is used to model the expected benefit uptake. The modelled uptake is compared against actual uptake and the outliers identified.
What it tells us about child poverty
The dashboard has three main elements:
- An interactive map of West Lothian showing uptake status of benefits at data zone level. Users can select to view different combinations of benefits or single benefit uptake.
- A data table allows the user to view all the data and filter down to specific measures of interest by year, benefit, data zone or uptake status. This data can then be downloaded for further inspection.
- Change over time panel (currently for education benefits only). This allows the user to view the relationship of benefit uptake against indicators of demand at different points in time.
The primary purpose of the dashboard is to direct attention to where uptake is different to what is expected. As data zone is the lowest level of granularity available, local authorities will still need to intervene to better understand this difference. West Lothian Council have a working prototype of the dashboard and have been able to identify data zones where there is lower than expected uptake of education benefits. From these insights they have begun to design interventions in these areas to improve uptake.
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Tooltype: Interactive Dashboard
Organisation: Improvement Service
Contact: research@improvementservice.org.uk
Purpose
The Child Poverty Map dashboard shows child poverty rates at data zone level for all 32 Scottish council areas and Scottish Child Payment (SCP) take-up rates for all council areas at intermediate zone level.
Content
The data used for child poverty figures is the Children in Low-Income Families (CILIF) dataset, publicly available from the DWP StatXplore data platform. This is publicly available at data zone level. NRS Small Area Population Estimates are used as a denominator to convert the CILIF figures to a rate. Scottish Child Payment Caseload data is publicly available from Social Security Scotland at intermediate zone. For the CILIF figures users can view data for 2018-19 through to 2023-24. SCP data is available for the year 2023-24 only but this can be broken down to view it by different age groups.
Data can be downloaded for both child poverty rates and Scottish Child Payment. Users can download the complete dataset for each indicator or subsets based on their selections in the dashboard.What it tells us about child poverty
The dashboard is available to all 32 Scottish councils and allows for identification of areas with high and low levels of child poverty and Scottish Child Payment uptake. This can be used to further prioritise interventions and for resource allocation.
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Tooltype: Data Analytics Platform
Organisation: Policy in Practice
Contact: hello@policyinpractice.co.uk
Purpose
The Low Income Family Tracker (LIFT) is a data product owned and managed by Policy in Practice to help local authorities link data to maximise residents' income.
The LIFT tool can be used for gaining strategic insights for shaping policy and reporting, and for helping design outreach and campaign programmes.Content
LIFT is a data platform that combines several different datasets to provide an extensive view of low-income families. It brings together data on council tax reduction, housing benefit and legacy benefits. It can be used to tackle persistent debt and arrears, maximise income of households, identify those families at risk of eviction, avoid unnecessary costs by preventing hardship, and help local authorities understand the demand for services.
LIFT combines multiple datasets to increase understanding of low-income families, enabling councils to better support families and track the success of interventions. It has been implemented in Aberdeen and Fife Council areas. A subscription to the service is required to make use of LIFT.What it tells us about child poverty
LIFT has been used by Aberdeen and Fife Councils to identify people who are financially vulnerable and target support towards them. One of its key uses is targeting benefit take up related to child poverty.
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Organisation: CACI (Consumer and
Demographic Data Segmentation Solutions)Contact: info@caci.co.uk
Purpose
The CACI Child Poverty Playbook is designed as a how-to guide for councils and organisations to navigate key policy challenges related to child poverty. The playbook provides a framework for identification of households most vulnerable to poverty by bringing multiple datasets together. This includes CACI's datasets, local authority databases, and publicly available data. The playbook outlines the practical considerations that councils should take to develop actionable insights that support effective allocation of resources and allow progress to be tracked over time. It also includes a number of best practice case studies in use of data.
Under the five year Scotland-wide data agreement between CACI and Scottish councils, via COSLA, councils are able to purchase access to the Acorn and Paycheck datasets at a reduced cost.
Content
Acorn Consumer Segmentation:
A dataset that combines geographic, demographic, and lifestyle information. It is designed for understanding the different types of people in different areas and is updated annually. The Acorn dataset is constructed from data including the Census, Land Registry, Energy Performance Certificates (EPC), Universal Credit, and postcode and spatial data which are a mix of open, commercial, and proprietry datasets.Paycheck:
This dataset provides gross household income estimates at postcode level for the UK. It calculates total income from all sources including earnings, benefits, savings and investments and contains the mean, median and modal income broken down into 26 -£5k gross income bands. Paycheck is comprised of data from CACI's Ocean database, CACI held demographic data and UK government (ONS) data on UK average earnings and the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF).What it tells us about child poverty
The Acorn dataset classifies households into 61 different types to a very granular level, including postcode. These classifications can be used to understand areas with households most likely to be financially vulnerable. Along with the CACI Playbook, knowledge of the types of households in an area allows councils to better design communication and outreach strategies and target resources.
Paycheck can be used for tackling child poverty by identifying financially vulnerable households.
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Tooltype: Interactive Dashboard
Organisation: Centre for Civic Innovation (GCC)
Purpose
Glasgow City Council’s Child Poverty in Glasgow Dashboard is designed to partner the Centre for Civic Innovation’s Child Poverty report. The aim of the dashboard is to provide council officers and groups with an interest in reducing child poverty with the knowledge to make decisions, design services and policies, and allocate resources effectively.
Content
The dashboard displays the child poverty rate, the number of children and the number of households. Data can be viewed for relative poverty or deep poverty, and filtered by family priority group, children’s age, whether a household is in employment or unemployed, and housing tenure.
The data can be viewed for each month starting from February 2020 to March 2025, or can be viewed for a rolling 12-month period from the 12 months to June 2024 to the 12 months to March 2025. The dashboard landing page opens on to a map of Glasgow, divided by Ward level, with the option to switch and view indicators at intermediate zone level.
Using the same indicators and filtering options there is functionality to view trends over time and compare, either at Ward or intermediate zone level, different areas against each other and/or against the overall rates or numbers for Glasgow.What it tells us about child poverty
The dashboard uses council tax reduction and housing benefit data held by Glasgow City council. These datasets hold information on citizens household composition and their incomes. Total household income is calculated with input from other sources including, employment benefit and pensions. These incomes are then compared with the poverty threshold factoring in the composition of the household, to establish if the household is living in poverty.
Poverty estimates are only for those households in receipt of housing benefit or council tax reduction, and does not show data for households that may be in poverty but are not receiving these benefits.
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Tooltype: Interactive Dashboard
Organisation: Public Health Scotland
Contact: phs.stats.gov@phs.scot
Purpose
The data indicators in the dashboard focus on the drivers of child poverty to support taking a preventative approach that has the biggest impact on improving the lives of low-income families. The dashboard forms part of the Prioritise Child Poverty Resource that aims to support local strategic child poverty planning, monitoring, and evaluation.
Content
The dashboard uses routine, quantitative data indicators from national sources about:
- local population contexts
- child poverty priority families
- children and their health outcomes
- drivers of child poverty, including income from employment, income from social security, cost of living
The dashboard contains 61 indicators at local authority level, with some indicators available at data zone and intermediate zone . Data for all indicators can be downloaded in csv format and for each indicator there is an ‘About the Data’ tab which tells users about the data used to create the indicator, whether it is a primary or secondary source, and where the data can be accessed. Data for each indicator is displayed over time and different local authority areas can be compared against each other.
What it tells us about child poverty
The quantitative data provided in the dashboard is deigned to be used alongside other sources, such as qualitative data and evidence of what works to help local authorities develop plans for tackling child poverty. The tool is designed to be used for conducting deep data dives for identifying local needs, priority areas and developing outcomes. It is also designed to assist with annual monitoring and evaluating the impact of actions.
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Tooltype: Dataset
Organisation: ONS Local
Contact: ONS.Local@ons.gov.uk
Purpose
The ONS Local dataset provides comparative insights into the drivers of child poverty across all Scottish local authorities and their counterparts across Great Britain (GB). It is intended to support evidence-based policy development, benchmarking, and the sharing of good practice.
This dataset is just one of a number of datasets and data tools designed to support local authorities in Scotland to understand and take action to tackle child poverty. The main point of difference for this dataset is its inclusion of GB wide comparators. The data provide a comparable indicator set across GB and analyses this to create groupings of “like” local authorities. This dataset can add most value when used in conjunction with these other resources to add a wider context and a wider range of comparator local authority areas in which to understand performance and to seek good practice.Content
The primary purpose of this dataset is to compare all Scottish local authorities with similar areas from across GB based on the drivers of child poverty.
Each Scottish local authority is matched with others from across Scotland and the rest of Great Britain that are statistically similar in terms of these drivers.
The tables also include data on other aspects relevant to child poverty. The data includes:- Measures of child poverty before and after housing costs
- Data on six of the seven drivers of child poverty used by the Scottish Government,
- Population characteristics for each local authority including data related to the priority groups,
- Other contextual information including (Scottish) Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) share and population density.
What it tells us about child poverty
This dataset is designed to support Scottish local authorities to:
- Benchmark performance against similar authorities across GB, beyond those in Scotland.
- Support policy development by identifying shared challenges and successful interventions.
- Facilitate peer learning and collaborative working between councils with similar profiles and facing similar challenges.
- Inform local child poverty strategies, funding bids, and service redesign by providing a comprehensive and standard set of data.
The 'go to' organisation for Local Government improvement in Scotland
