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RESOLVED:
 
1. 
Authorised the Council to accept the proposed Household
Support Fund 6 programme grant funding of £2,822,258.58 from
the Department for Work and Pensions (October 2024 - March 2025) as
set out in this report and authorised the distribution of such
grant monies to the voluntary and community sector organisations
and external bodies set out in Appendix 2.

 
2. 
Delegated authority to approve any amendments to the
programme and the deployment of resources to respond to any
requirements of funding received via guidance and to utilise any
underspends from October 2024 to March 2025 to the Director of
Corporate Strategy & Transformation in consultation with the
Portfolio Holder for Employment, Human Resources and Equalities to
ensure the funding is fully utilised to deliver crisis support to
Hackney residents.
 
REASONS FOR DECISION
 
This report sets out plans for the use of
Hackney’s £2,822,258.58 Household Support Fund
allocation which must be spent in full between 1st October 2024 and
31st March 2025. Any funding unspent would be clawed back by the
Department for Work and Pensions.
 
Officers started to consider the design of
this Household Support Fund programme as soon as the announcement
to extend the programme was made on 2nd September. Given the short
time scales and the need to stand up the programme as quickly as
possible for the 1st October, following discussion with relevant
cabinet leads, it was agreed that the existing programme would
largely be continued.
 
The programme design is based on the following
guiding principles.  These principles
were developed for previous iterations of HSF and given the
programme and approach will be broadly similar they will continue
to provide a framework for delivery of HSF 6:
 
Sustainability, early help and prevention Our
learning from the current and previous programmes supports
transition from an approach based on crisis support to one based on
less transactional, longer-term and more sustainable forms of
support that can help prevent and mitigate financial crises. This
includes the provision of advice to help residents maximise their
incomes alongside emergency support like food parcels; and measures
to reduce bills in the long-term e.g. purchase of household goods,
energy-saving advice and devices.
 
Building connectivity The Department for Work
and Pension and the University of Sheffield have complimented the
breadth and reach of Hackney’s Household Support Fund
programme, early results from the University of Sheffield
evaluation suggest that we need to improve connectivity between the
different parts of the programme and improve relationships and
referral routes between organisations and services involved in
supporting residents facing financial hardship to enable residents
to obtain the support they need quickly and prevent them falling
into deeper crisis. We acknowledge a crisis response programme such
as this cannot solve these long-term, systemic issues. We will seek
to use these resources to build relationships between services and
encourage greater collaboration.
 
Eligibility: This funding is for people facing
financial hardship e.g. those struggling to meet the cost of food
and fuel. We will focus resources on groups we know to be at
greater risk of poverty such as families with children, disabled,
and older residents.
 
Consistency The HSF programme has evolved over
the past four years. We have built trusted relationships with
services and partners. Given the short-term funding available it
makes sense to continue the programme along broadly similar lines
as at present. 
 
Timeliness: To ensure continuity we will need
to start delivering our new programme on or near the start of
October.
 
Avoiding a funding ‘cliff edge’
for residents, services and partners This funding, though welcome,
is only for six months. We have to assume that the programme will
end in March 2025 and will need to ensure we avoid a funding
cliff-edge for residents and services.
 
Continuity: Taking forward work we have
started with schools, Adults and Children’s Social Care,
GP’s, housing and other frontline services.
 
Governance: 
Options on governance for the wider poverty reduction work,
including a board that provides oversight and steer, are being
developed in alignment with the emerging Equality Plan governance
and will incorporate HSF programme reporting.
 
Mitigating the impact of Universal Credit
migration From April 2024, around 15,000
Hackney households on legacy benefits such as Income Support and
Tax Credits will be migrated to Universal Credit. Residents stand
to lose entitlement if they fail to comply with the instructions in
their migration letter. In addition, the Council and RSLs stand to
lose revenues if housing benefits are not claimed. We are working
with the DWP to ensure the right kind of information and support is
in place to meet the needs of Hackney’s diverse communities.
We will use some of this allocation to ensure all our communities
are properly informed about the move to Universal Credit and that
they receive the support they need to migrate successfully.
 
Capturing learning
We want to ensure that we continue to use this programme to deepen
our learning about poverty, its causes and most impactful
mitigations. We will sharpen our focus on quantitative and
qualitative data collection. This will feed into the programme
evaluation which will help inform future service design and
commissioning.
 
As of 18/09/24 we are yet to receive guidance
from the DWP on use of this round of Household Support Funding, so
this programme is set up on the assumption that the guidance will
not result in any significant changes to the principles and
approach taken for HSF 5. We will continue to provide updates on
the programme via the OFP report submissions including any notable
changes to guidance, including if specific portions of funding
towards administration costs are indicated. The recommendation at
3.2 is therefore included so that Hackney has the flexibility to
respond to any changes in scheme requirements set out in guidance
from Government and to respond to delivery factors (eg take up) to ensure that the impact of monies
are maximised locally.
 
In April this year, we also revisited a
prioritisation exercise conducted in preparation for the Household
Support Fund programme in 2022 and the summary of issues raised
during the recent consultation on the Council’s Equality Plan
to check whether there were any groups whose needs were not being
addressed in our plans. We have tried to develop interventions to
address these needs in the last HSF programme that ran from April
to September 2024 and will continue this work in this
programme.
 
Groups identified through the prioritisation
exercise
 
· 
People living in the private rented sector and those renting from
registered social landlords
· 
Residents facing life-changing events, especially the death of a
close relative
· 
Older people
· 
Disabled residents and carers
· 
People with No Recourse to Public Funds with children or those at
risk of serious health issues
· 
People in insecure work
· 
Linguistically or digitally excluded communities
· 
Making the best use of the data provided to us by the
Government
 
Groups identified through the Equality Plan
consultation
 
· 
People experiencing or fleeing Domestic Violence
· 
People with Sickle Cell Anaemia and Thalassemia
· 
People who misuse drugs and alcohol
· 
People with sensory impairments (visually and hearing impaired
people)
· 
LGBTQIA+ residents
· 
Refugees and migrants who are disabled, have children or are
LGBTQIA+ or those from communities where there is less public
sympathy e.g. Syrians, Turkish and Kurdish
· 
Young offenders who have experienced the youth justice system
struggling with insecure employment
· 
Neurodiverse people struggling to get
into employment
· 
The Turkish and Kurdish community
· 
Residents experiencing domestic violence
 
Proposed HSF 6 Programme (October 2024 - March
2025)
 
We have used the information and insights
above, and discussions with colleagues from across the Council and
wider system to devise the following HSF programme for October 2024
to March 2025.
 
Children and families 0-19: Allocation:
£1,490,930
 
This funding provides holiday food support to
families claiming free school meals in state-maintained colleges,
schools and children's centres and food support to children in the
Orthodox Jewish community via 11 community organisations (see
appendix 2 for details of organisations funded). We are proposing
to utilise up to £151,990 of the allocation to support
increasing the provision of wrap around support and advice to
schools in the borough.
 
Vulnerable people known to the Council:
Allocation £221,000
 
This funding will enable the Council to make
one-off crisis payments to residents known to Adult Social Care,
Children’s Social Care and the Temporary and Supported
Accommodation service, These include disabled, and older adults and
carers known to Adult Social Care, children in need, foster carers
and special guardians known to Children’s Social Services,
Refugees staying in hotels in Hackney recently granted the right to
remain in the UK and residents living in temporary and supported
accommodation in need of financial support. These are all groups
known to be at risk of financial hardship.
 
Breaking down the barriers to reach a wider
group of vulnerable residents who are at risk of poverty:
Allocation £760,500
 
Our Poverty Reduction Framework and subsequent
analysis of groups at risk of financial hardship (outlined above)
identified a wide range of groups that we need to reach. In some
cases, they face multiple barriers to accessing help, such as
learning disability or language needs, or they would not access
help from the Council because of stigma or lack of trust in
statutory services.
 
This includes funding for crisis payments via
Money Hub (£250,000) and through Trusted referral partners -
Council and health services such as Hackney Works, the Leaving Care
Service, Health Visiting and Social Prescribing can refer residents
they know to be in financial hardship for one-off crisis payment
(£125,000), support with food, fuel and other essentials from
smaller voluntary and community sector organisations via Hackney
Giving (£150,000), support with household goods
(£50,000), Community infrastructure organisations
(£45,500), Citizens Advice (£35,000), Food banks and
low-cost shops (£70,000), Purchase and distribution of energy
saving packs (£25,000), and providing lunch vouchers via
Libraries events (£10,000).
 
Advice-based initiatives: Allocation:
£151,250
 
This part of the allocation will be used to
fund the provision of welfare benefits and financial advice in a
range of settings across the borough to accompany the crisis
support residents will be receiving from this programme to help
them achieve longer-term financial stability.
 
Programme management and administration:
Allocation: £167,687
 
This funding will be used to support programme
management, administration and communication with residents and
partner organisations. The current projected administration costs
sit at 7.07% of the budget.
 
DETAILS OF ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS CONSIDERED AND
REJECTED
 
We considered reopening an open competition
process to allocate this funding. However, the coordination and
implementation of this approach in such a short timescale was
potentially high risk and unachievable. Working with trusted
partners who can mobilise quick responses to requests for help and
where we are already aware of need, was considered the most
effective response.
 
We considered allocating lower administration
and management fees, but the tight timescales and targeted nature
of the grants will put pressure on organisations already stretched
by the response to the Cost of Living Crisis. Failure to recognise
the costs of managing and administering these grants is potentially
destabilising for organisations, who we have approached to work
with us.