Question three was partly answered by our responses to questions one and two. What we were most keen to avoid was a new system where eligible households were required to apply for support from the new Household Support fund or to provide information as a condition of access to support. The Council’s allocation from the Household Support Fund was inclusive of administration costs which of course meant that the more the Council spent on administration, the less was available for the vulnerable, low-income households for whom this grant was intended.
Any application-based system would likely entail very significant administration costs – chiefly the costs of staff required to receive, process, and decide what could be a very large number of applications. An application based system would also create barriers to support and would likely result in households needing support missing out either because they did not apply or did not provide information requested.
The fact that the Council already operated an application-based, local welfare assistance scheme (Southwark Emergency Support - with a separate budget, policy, and eligibility criteria) that would continue to operate as normal alongside the new Household Support fund, made it easier to implement our preferred approach. This meant that the Council could offer four separate routes to local welfare support that were not necessarily mutually exclusive and that ensured the widest possible coverage while keeping administrative costs down:
- Southwark Energy Support (Main scheme) – targeted at selected LCTS claimants (working-age or pensioners not receiving Pension Credit Guarantee) and funded from Household Support Grant
- Southwark Energy Support (Community Referral Pathway) – based on referrals from community partners of households who are vulnerable pay energy bills but do not claim welfare benefits and are not known to the Council. Funded from Household Support Grant.
- Southwark Emergency Support – based on individual applications from households facing an emergency and unable to meet their immediate basic needs for food, fuel, or other essentials. Not funded from Household Support Grant.
- Holiday Free School Meals – targeted at children of low-income families on school rolls and eligible for free school meals (free school meals is a passported benefit based on entitlement to other income-related benefits. It is a statutory scheme run by the Department for Education but administered by local authorities and schools. There is no statutory provision for free school meals during school holidays). Funded from Household Support Grant.
For what we called our main scheme, the households identified as eligible for support without having to apply were current LCTS claimants and claiming other income-related benefits. All would have passed through a verification gateway when they first applied for that support. They will have completed an application and provided proof of ID and other evidence to the Council or the DWP in support of their claim. They may have been asked to provide further verification of their circumstances during the life of their claim. We could see no valid reason why they should be required to do so again as a condition of access to the Household Support fund. Post Office Payout offers a further layer of security against fraud or abuse as recipients must go to a Post Office and present the letter and proof of their ID before the bar-coded letter may be redeemed by Post Office staff.
For households referred by community partners via the community referral pathway (CRP), the Council delegated responsibility for identifying and referring eligible households to the partners - all of which signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Council. Partners were not funded separately by the Council to make referrals and our shared assumption was that those referred would be those who had made contact with partner organisations for other reasons. For example, a household visiting a foodbank to seek emergency food support could be identified by foodbank staff or volunteers as eligible for help with energy costs and, where they consented, referred to the Council in a matter of minutes using a simple e-form. The Council would carry out no further means-testing on the household referred but would carry out simple checks for example to ensure that the household referred were resident in the borough and that they had not received support or were not due to receive support through the main scheme.
The new fund would not be widely publicised. No information was posted on the Council website and communication was limited to those identified as eligible through the main scheme or who had been referred by community partners.
Post Office Payout had stood out as the preferred option for several reasons, including costs. It was the lowest cost option among all those we considered by a considerable margin and the low costs of procurement were matched by the simplicity and ease of use. We post the funds required to our account and then upload a file containing the names and addresses of those to receive a barcoded letter and the specified amount (£) into an online portal. The Post Office and Royal Mail do everything else – printing, dispatching, and delivering the bar-coded letters and then redeeming those letters on presentation at Post Office counters.
Additionally, the Post Office has a unique status as a supplier, and the procurement of the Post Office Payout service is very straightforward for Councils able to take advantage of the Crown Services Commercial Framework - further reducing time, effort, and cost. Southwark Council was not previously a user of Post Office Payout but was able to complete procurement in just a few weeks in November and December last year.
For the Holiday Free School Meals element of the Council’s programme, it is greatly to the credit of the more than one hundred participating schools that they absorbed all costs of administration within their own budgets