Good morning and welcome from the Work and Pensions Select Committee and the third oral evidence session for the pensioner poverty inquiry. It is a pleasure to welcome our witnesses this morning. If you would like to introduce yourselves, starting with David?

Thank you. I am David Fothergill. I am a Councillor in Somerset, but I am the Chair of the LGA Community Wellbeing Board, which does a lot of work in this area.

Good morning. I am Alistair Smyth, Director of Policy and Research at the National Housing Federation. We are the trade body for housing associations in England, which between them have around 2.8 million homes for around 6 million people.

Thank you. I am Deven Ghelani. It is good to meet you all. I was one of the people who worked on Universal Credit when it was originally conceived at the Centre for Social Justice. I set up an organisation called Policy in Practice, which helps people navigate the social security system through software, analytics and practical support.

Hi, everyone. I am Fabian Chessell from Policy in Practice. I have spent most of my career working on using data to improve public services both from the outside and from the inside.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, everyone. I will kick off, if that is okay. We know that the Government have said they intend to conduct a review on pension adequacy. I wondered what wider factors should be included in this. Perhaps we will start with David.

Thank you very much. “Pension poverty” is an all-encompassing term that hides a lot of detail—which hopefully we will go into today—but it cannot be taken in isolation. Some of the challenges around pension poverty are particularly around health, around housing, around income, all deeply entwined and, on top of that, of course, we have frailty, health and also loneliness. Certain areas have deep levels of pensioner poverty, areas perhaps where we would not expect it, but it is a complex picture, and you cannot tackle one without pulling all the levers and trying to tackle it all. We would welcome an integrated approach to pensioner poverty.

In terms of the review, you are absolutely right about the pension and property issues and the different factors. In terms of the adequacy of the review, should that encompass the areas that you have just mentioned?

It has to because, if you do not, you are missing some of the key aspects of it. We would encourage it, particularly around how some of those areas are funded and the long-term sustainability of the support that they give to pensioners. The more encompassing it can be, the more appropriate the outcomes.

Thank you. Mr Smyth, do you want to add to that?

Certainly. If I may, I will give a slightly broader response to this question. I like to focus in particular, when thinking about pension adequacy, on the role that specialist housing for older people plays and in particular the role of our sector, the housing association sector and the local authority sector, in providing much more affordable housing for older people, which helps particularly people of pensionable age who are on low household incomes. Our sector provides over 260,000 specialist homes for older people. Many of those are sheltered housing. Some are extra care. They range from a low level of support to very high levels of care and support, depending on the residents’ needs. Also, within our general needs population, 29% of households are aged 65 or above. That is potentially another 700,000 or so people just in our homes alone of pension age. Our homes are highly affordable, they are secure, and they provide someone with a place to live for as long as they are able. To give you an indication of how affordable they are compared with other tenures, typically a tenant living in sheltered housing in our sector would pay around £150 rent and service charge per week. If they were living in a private sector equivalent of that, they would probably be paying two and a half or three times that—in London, where the housing market is more extreme, it would be five times that. Somebody on a typical income, which in a housing association home is a household income of £20,000 a year, would have to pay only around a quarter of their income on their housing costs. If you had that same income in the private sector, you would be paying perhaps up to three quarters. The point of that is to illustrate how affordable our offer is. However, of course, we are not building enough housing for older people. The Government’s own Older People’s Housing Taskforce said we need 30,000 to 50,000 specialist homes for older people a year. We build 7,000 currently in this country. Our sector, the social rented sector, builds around 2,000 a year. That is one tenth of the social rented housing for older people that we need. I have a couple more points about what we need then to help with that and build more housing for older people. We have set out a strong case to the Government in our spending review submission for a long-term rent settlement for social housing at CPI plus 1%; funding for existing homes so that we can pay to improve, refurbish and regenerate those homes, and prepare them for net zero, and to manage building safety costs; and also of course funding for new homes. Importantly for housing for older people, we are also asking for support with revenue costs around care and support costs, which are important for housing for older people. My final point is around the Government’s long-term housing strategy, which they have said they intend to publish over the summer. We greatly welcome that at the National Housing Federation. It is important as part of that strategy that older persons’ housing is considered within that. Given the age profile of the population now and over the next 20 years, it is important, alongside targets for housing overall, to have sub-targets for housing for older people, which would drive an increase in delivering those kinds of homes. With those kinds of homes comes an opportunity to also link increased supply to savings to the health and social care systems. Ample research out there shows how the right housing for older people reduces pressure on health systems and social care systems. That is desirable both for the individuals in those homes and for the public purse.

I will make a couple of broad points. First, you cannot look at pension poverty and pensions adequacy as a whole. It is different for the lowest-income pensioners compared to, say, middle-income pensioners. The situations that they are in are different and Government policy interacts with their lives differently. I guess that is the first point. If you look at the state pension, that will impact middle-income pensioners much more. The triple lock will have a greater impact on their incomes than, say, on those on the lowest incomes who are dependent on pension credit and not benefiting from the triple lock in that situation. Secondly, again, it is hard to look at pensions adequacy without looking at working age and what drives it. We make the point about housing, absolutely rightly, for older people. Also, younger people, people of working age, are in exactly the same situation. One interesting statistic to draw out, which again struck me when looking at these figures, is that the level of support that someone on a low income aged 62 gets versus a 70-year-old in exactly the same situation is considerably different. It is 2.4 times as much if they are 70 compared to if they are 62, just below pension age. That difference is quite striking. The argument is that if you are of working age, you do not need as much support because you can work, but that changes as you get older. If we do not tackle overall income adequacy, it is hard to look at pensions adequacy in isolation from overall adequacy.

I will save my comments for the section on data.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thinking about it, we have had a good overview of the importance of housing in relation to pension adequacy. What about energy costs, especially given this week’s announcement? Does anybody want to have a go at that?

I am happy to. Energy costs are particularly important—again, speaking to your point—not just for older residents but in fact for all residents living in social housing. They have increased enormously over the last few years. Our sector does a great deal of work to help residents to manage with those costs. Most of our housing association members will have discretionary funds of their own, sizeable funds, which they are used to make emergency payments to tenants who find themselves in severe financial hardship. They also have an array of partnership arrangements in place to help tenants to manage with energy costs and the wider costs of living. That may be to help tenants access vouchers to support them with energy costs or third-party organisations that will provide other kinds of support for energy costs but also support with things like food costs. Many of our housing association members have links with local foodbanks and food pantries to help people living in housing for older people. They will have schemes where people come in and provide food from foodbanks or from food pantries for a low fee. It is healthy and affordable food. Our members do an array of things to help manage with energy costs. Nonetheless, it still remains a pressure. That is borne out in the latest data from the English Housing Survey, which shows the extent to which there has been an increase in all tenures in cases of damp and mould. That is largely attributable to the increase in the costs of heating homes.

This is an area of concern. Leaving aside the winter fuel payment, local authorities have stepped in to fill a lot of the gaps, particularly for the pensioners who have lost that allowance and also the ones who are close to it. They have done it using the household support fund. It was helpful to have the household support fund extended that we have been able to use. We have to recognise that there is a real pressure on that fund and also the fact that it is not guaranteed beyond next year and so we are heading to a cliff edge. At the moment, local authorities are stepping in and filling that role and supporting particularly with energy costs and other living costs. Therefore, our concern is about the long-term term sustainability and how we can help those people who are on that margin to keep affording those bills. If we could get that visibility and the longer-term sustainability funding through the household support fund, we can do a lot more work and ensure that we support a lot more people through those energy costs and through their other costs.

The point on the household support fund is important. We will discuss that in a little bit more detail later on. Councillor Fothergill, the LGA argues that tackling high housing costs should be a priority, but what remains the priority around the DWP or other Departments? How should that be apportioned?

For us, housing is the priority. We have already heard about the growing number and proportion of older people and housing that has been built. You only have to drive around new housing estates and see that housing is not being built for older people. It is being built for families and there is a real concern there. We have to put more effort into that. The ringfenced funding for that was taken away in 2011. Therefore, we as local authorities have not been able to support the development of supported housing. Also, there are issues within the planning law. I know it is probably outside your remit, but we all have planning difficulties in ensuring the delivery of more supported housing. The system is complex for us to deliver those things and so there is a shortage. We do need it. A lot of our own funding goes into supporting homeless. It goes into supporting those who require temporary accommodation, which is taking up significant amounts of local authority funding and, therefore, that is money that cannot be spent on some of the areas that we are talking about today.

Before we move off it, David raised a relevant point around how local authorities are getting support to pensioners who need it. It is difficult to talk about this topic around energy costs without bringing up the winter fuel payment and the loss of that for middle-income pensioners. It is important to recognise two things. It is positive that the Government were encouraged to take up a pension credit in response to that and so more people are receiving pension credit. I am sure we will move on to that topic, but it is worth spending a little more time on. That is using the data they hold today to identify pensioners who should be claiming pension credit but are not and contacting them and helping them to reach those households. The point I wanted to make sure landed in that context is that local authorities have been able to do quite a bit more to identify pensioners just above the pension credit threshold who are missing out and targeting the household support fund using that mechanism to directly put the money that pensioners who have lost it definitely need it back into their pockets. That has been quite interesting. If we—as some members will—accept that it is not necessary for the most well-off pensioners, how we effectively get some additional support to those just missing out is an interesting question and one that local authorities have been able to answer by working effectively together. The final point—and again, let us know if you want to get into it in more detail—is that putting money into people’s pockets is a bit of a sticking plaster solution. If we do not reduce the cost of heating a home, it will be a problem. There are opportunities to use information intelligently to help identify which homes need what type of insulation and how to get the push toward net zero into homes as effectively as possible. It is one of those areas where, if the Government are set to spend £6 billion on improving the energy efficiency of homes, probably at the moment, if we do not do it intelligently, £1 billion or more of that is going to go towards finding the right homes and the right people. That seems incredibly inefficient and that is where local authorities and central Government working together, and housing associations as well can make a real difference.

Thank you. Can I just come back? You might want to add on to your reply to this question. Given that we know 6% of pensioners are in the private rented sector—and I appreciate that is not your area, but it would be welcome if you could comment on it—and our previous Select Committee recommended an increase in the local housing allowance to support people on low incomes to access secure, affordable private rented housing, what should we be doing in this space?

As that is not directly within our remit, I will keep my comments brief on that. Certainly, we have seen a serious issue with local housing allowance falling underneath the 30th percentile in recent years. It was re-banded at the 30th percentile two years ago, which was helpful, but it has slipped back since then. At least, the Government could bring LHA back to the 30th percentile. Doing that would help some of those pensioners living in the PRS. I am bound to say that a better alternative for those people would be to find a home in the social sector where they could have a much more affordable rent, but to do that we need to build those homes.

All right. Of course, according to current estimates, we anticipate nearly one in five people will be living in, as it currently stands. I will hand over to Amanda Hack, who has some additional questions on this.

Adding on to that, the situation is you would prefer people who are living in the private rented sector to live in social housing. The social housing sector has only a limited amount of specialist housing. What work has been done to try to lobby for more extra care? I worked in social housing for 20 years and we did not deliver one sheltered scheme extra. We did extra care but not a sheltered scheme. What work has been done with the National Housing Federation particularly to increase the numbers of older persons’ accommodation and to ensure there is that availability? Has any work been done on the stock profile and what might be the future demand in your current stock profile and what might need to change in your housing offer across the sector?

In part, the answer to this is part of our broader work around conversations with the Government about the upcoming spending review and all the things I talked about before in terms of rent and funding for existing homes and new homes to give housing associations the financial capacity they need to invest in new housing. An integral part of the input model into building new social housing is the capacity our members have themselves to invest in that new housing. That is an important part of the answer. It is a bit more challenging for members to build housing for older people in particular. Why? The capital costs are more with housing for older people because the buildings are different, they are more complicated, and they have larger communal spaces that do not generate rent. It is more expensive to build them in the first place and so we need the right level of capital funding to reflect that. Probably the biggest drag certainly over the last 15 years or so—and David mentioned this—is the significant reduction in funding for support and, alongside that, funding for care. When our members look at building new schemes for older people, they will consider the viability in the round and that assessment will look at the capital costs and the ongoing revenue costs for the residents living in that housing. They will have ongoing care and support needs. If that cannot be funded appropriately, the risk of developing that building is extremely high because then you will not be able to cover the running costs of the building. That is why there has been that lack of appetite. We have been lobbying for the right capital funding for housing for older people, but it is critical alongside that that the right revenue funding comes with it because, if it does not, the homes will not be built. I saw a recent example from a member of a scheme that they have redeveloped. It showed that overall, to make it stack up to redevelop the scheme, they had to fund almost 50% of it themselves from their own financial resources. That is other tenants’ rents and that is also a finite model. The system has only a certain amount of capacity. They did it because they wanted to do it, and it was the right thing to do but cannot be repeated.

Do you want to carry on, Amanda?

Yes, absolutely. David, from a local authority point of view, what are the tangible outcomes of working to bring health and housing together and what are the limitations? I imagine each local authority area will take their own view on how they do that. Is there any sense of how that could be consistently applied?

You take us partly into the territory of local government reorganisation there. I will speak about as somebody from a county that went through LGR three years ago and as somebody that promoted heavily moving to a unitary. The opportunity to align social care and housing with health is enormous because it means that everybody is sharing the same information. People do not operate between Chinese walls. The two-tier system currently—in my belief, not necessarily LGA policy—makes that more complicated. Certainly, in Somerset, where I come from, we can see the benefit of that. By bringing health and housing and social care together, you are coming up with a much more comprehensive solution for people, meaning that they have only single points of contact. Part of the problem here for older people is the complexity of how they work their way through the system, particularly if they are dealing with different organisations, makes it far more difficult. The more that we can align health, housing and social care together, it has to be right.

We want to make sure that people are healthy and happy in their homes for as long as possible. What do you do from a local government perspective to try to broker that gap between what people need and what they have? How do we get to what they need?

Before we need specialist supported housing, there is an area where we make adaptations, and we provide adaptations to houses to keep people in their homes as long as possible. The longer we can keep them in their homes, the healthier they will be and the happier life they will lead. To keep them there as long as possible, we make adaptations and of course we have grants that we give out for that. We work closely with the NHS on provision of social care into housing to make sure that people have that, and we try to provide additional support and advice, which helps people to stay in their homes longer, whether it is additional support on fuels or insulation or whatever. That is important. Only local authorities can do that. I am sorry—this might be a bit controversial—but local authorities know their local population and they know how people can access help in that village or that community. They work locally. If that becomes too distant, it becomes far more difficult. That is the strength that we bring to this.

You started off with the local government reorganisation. My constituency is in a three-tier environment and so we have a district council that controls the local plan and the county council that does the rest. The fragmentation of those two elements quite often means that local plans do not have enough future housing for older people; it certainly feels like that is the case. Does there need to be some element of how we plan? We age. That happens. Do our local plans recognise that? How do we work together to build that into the local planning process?

Absolutely. Public health and the health and wellbeing boards have a greater role here. They have the statutory responsibility to look at the joint strategic needs of the community. Therefore, they have an important role, which at the moment is not being realised. They are not paying a key part in this in a lot of areas. There are some good examples where they are, but so much more information is available and could be brought to that process.

Lovely. Thank you. Would any other mechanisms enable policy for older people to be better joined up more generally? For example, could an older people’s commissioner for the UK help? If so, how would that help?

Moving on to the devolution agenda, it is an important step because at the moment, in the Local Government Association, we are unsure what that means and what will come with that. Clearly, in urban areas, it is quite well defined already, in the West Midlands and so on, but joining together those services at a more strategic level may have much more of an impact but then it may lose that localness. We would like to be involved in that discussion about how we ensure that local provision is provided but that we do get that high strategic input.

Turning now to benefit take-up, what are the costs and benefits for local authorities of investing in benefit take-up campaigns?

Clearly, we as local authorities are responsible for certain benefits and that is clear, and we may encourage those. We are not responsible for certain benefits—pension credits—and, therefore, it is much more difficult to get the information to be able to lead a benefit take-up campaign. I am sure we will come on to data or information a bit later, but that is critical. We have to take away some of the barriers to share that information. Local authorities, though, represent our communities and our people and so of course we want to ensure that they have the proper funding to be able to leave fulfilling lives. I could give you various examples of places where, particularly over the course of last year on the winter fuel allowance, a lot of work has been done on benefit take-up campaigns. I stress again that that cannot be done from Westminster. It can be done only at a local level. I can tell you where all my community groups meet. I can tell you where my noticeboards are. I can tell you where all the information flows in my area. Local authorities know that information. It is much more difficult if you try to do it on a national basis.

It is probably helpful to say that Policy in Practice helps local authorities a lot with benefit take-up campaigns. It is probably important to say where that drive to do that work comes from initially and then I can talk a bit about the technicalities and how to improve it. My experience in this space and the reason I work in social security is that I was let go from a role a long time ago now, in 2007, and had to claim benefits. No one told me about housing benefit. At the time, I was renting in London. It was an incredibly difficult position to be in. I found out later that one part of the system does not speak to the other part of the system. A whole range of benefits each have their own rules, which makes it incredibly difficult to navigate. Honestly, I have been pulling at that thread ever since and this is where I have ended up. That is why we do this work. It is important to help people navigate the system because it is far more complex than it needs to be. Universal Credit was an effort to bring it together, but other parts of the system have become more complex at the same time. Helping people to navigate that is an important role. It is important to know where that comes from. Outside of my own personal motivations, it is critical because, when you look at people at the sharpest end living in near destitution or destitution, one of the simplest things you can do is help them access benefits and support that they should be claiming anyway. Effectively, we rely on the inefficiency of the system when, if the system worked more efficiently, you could probably finetune it and target support much more effectively. This is an evidence session on pensioner poverty but, again, you cannot look at pensioner poverty in isolation. The same principles apply to working-age households and to child poverty as well. The final point to talk about, in terms of the local role in this versus the national role, is that a transactional approach can be taken at scale using data, but a much more transformational approach can be taken at a local authority level. The impact and effectiveness we have seen from well-run local campaigns, which are able to innovate and build upon each other to deliver quite substantial differences in the level to which people respond to these take-up campaigns, is quite substantial. When we first started running take-up campaigns with the local authorities, we were getting maybe 14% response rates. The average is now 30% with the best performing getting well above 40% response rates to some of these campaigns. Again, that is down to better targeting, but it is also down to how the letters are worded, how follow-on support is carried out, whether there are follow-up phone calls and other things. We ran a take-up campaign—again, this is slightly outside of the pensioner remit—on attendance allowance. The response we had from one person who helped someone come in and complete an application was incredibly powerful. They have the money now to get to the appointments and do a little bit more besides, which they, frankly, did not have before. Going back into child poverty for a second, we ran a Healthy Start take-up campaign through text messages and people could follow up and give a survey response. The response was genuinely moving in the context of, “I have enough money to feed my baby”. It is genuinely making that much difference to people, which is why it matters that it happens. The question is how to get national approaches and national approaches to using data effectively working well with the local efforts on the ground, which is where you get the benefits of both scale and improving impact and innovation, which again happens much more at a local level.

Some of the points you made there tie into my next question around some research done by Loughborough University that said that for every £1 spent, there is a £2 potential saving in health and social care costs. That has a knock-on impact. Would you like to add anything to that discussion?

The knock-on impact is evident to the local authorities we work with. We measure the economic impact. We have run campaigns across lots of parts of the country, but I will use London as a broad example because we ran them consecutively over three years. The economic impact we have had is £10 million across London. If you take a lifetime view, it is over £100 million each year. That is £30 million over those years, but £300 million over the lifetime, which is an incredible difference to make. However, that does not take into account—and we would love to be able to measure this more effectively—the knock-on impact that that has on, say, the fiscal savings for the local authorities because people are eating better, heating their homes better, which is just through pension credit alone, and participating more actively in society, which means they may delay their social care costs and that they are occurring later in life, which has a has a fiscal impact. It is evident to us. We would love to be able to do more of the work with greater scientific rigour. To give you one example of a piece of work that is underway, we are doing a project with the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the moment looking at the drivers of a non-take up. It is designed as a random control trial. We sent different letters to different groups of pensioners with different statements at the top to test whether it is trust or whether it is the administration effort, such as, “We will help you to complete your application form”, or “No one need know. Your friends and family will not know you have applied unless you choose to tell them”, to deal with those different barriers and to see if we get different response rates to these messages. By doing that, highlighting the point on innovation earlier, we will start to understand the reasons people are not taking up support and so we can better design interventions in the future to focus on the biggest barriers. In some respects, it is unknown. We know it is awareness, administration effort, stigma, fear of dealing with the Government to a certain extent, but the scale of those and how they impact different groups is not well understood. Efforts to try to understand that better will drive improved impacts.

To expand on one of the points, we are currently doing some work on the impact of prevention into older age, the concept being that if you can delay by a series of decisions people going into social care and going into care homes across the country or across the authority, you can make a huge impact. This is a good example where, if we can encourage people to take up the right benefits so that they can lead the right lifestyle and they can access doctors and they can access pharmacies much more easily, it pushes back that social care cost and that is a huge benefit. It is also for the NHS as well because, if people are living a more comfortable lifestyle as opposed to in poverty, they are far less likely to access the NHS. If we can just push back the points when they access those services, we can have a significant impact. This preventative work in benefit take-up is so critical to trying to push some of those costs out.

I can talk about a practical example. I used to work in healthcare and worked with hospitals to help free up beds. We would frequently find 25% or 30% of beds were being occupied by people who had been in for over 14 days. These would be frail, elderly people. We launched a scheme where we would go and look at each and every single patient in that situation and work out what they needed before they went home. The answer was generally, when you looked at the conditions at their home, it was not felt safe to return them to their home. Why has that situation developed? They had been living in poverty for a number of years. I wanted to give that concrete connection between these big concepts and how that plays out on the ground.

If I could add to the wider point around value for money, I have a couple of examples from our sector in terms of money put in versus the outcome generated. In terms of the housing for older people offer, ample research out there shows the wider value-for-money case. Research a few years ago suggested that sheltered housing with lower levels of support would save the taxpayer something like £300 million a year because the homes are warmer and so those residents are less likely to need to go into hospital for respiratory illnesses. Our sector has the highest overall EPC performance of any tenure because our members invest significantly in the decarbonisation of their homes and want to help with fuel poverty. Separate research commissioned by one of our members, Anchor, showed that for every extra care home where extra care and support is delivered, the saving to the local authority in social care costs because of that preventative input is £6,700 per year per home. That is absolutely a value-for-money case. I realise it is slightly broader to your point but nonetheless I thought worth making.

Someone mentioned earlier some stats around take-up of attendance allowance but, in benefit take-up more broadly, what are the advantages and disadvantages of setting targets for take-up rates?

It sounds like a sensible idea. You need to enable those targets to be hit. Setting a target on its own without creating the enabling infrastructure is limiting and somewhat self-defeating. For my team, I try to set targets that they can hit. Otherwise, it is a bit unfair. It is probably better to respond in the context of the barriers to enabling that data to be used to drive targeted take-up much more. I will speak to a few broad initiatives and maybe hand over to Fabian, if it is okay, to speak in a little bit more depth. From a mission perspective, we are trying to go from taking the horse to water by identifying people missing out on unclaimed support, to making that horse drink by putting the money into people’s pockets. We have been able to do that reasonably well in some sectors. Around social tariffs, you can go straight from a benefit calculator to a direct application and award within minutes now, rather than having to go and apply separately to the water company, sometimes multiple water companies. The same goes for energy support. Similarly, we are working on auto-enrolment in that space. The appetite for Government-run schemes to move in that direction is certainly something to push toward. Could they be integrated into wider application or assessment systems being run through gov.uk or through organisations like ours and others, too? That is one approach. The second approach is unblocking data and how it can be used. HMRC has a couple of examples, particularly in the context of Universal Credit, which I appreciate is working age, that are worth getting into with this Committee. I will probably hand over to Fabian to touch on those briefly and then, if you want to dive into it more detail, we can go on for hours, to be honest.

There is always a risk of going on for hours when it comes to data and legislation. If you look at the pension age population, we can and already are doing a lot with data for benefits uptake. We have 100 councils working with us, but a lot have their own initiatives. That is around pension credit, absolutely, but it is also around other benefits, discretionary housing payment and targeting that on those who are just missing out, as well as going beyond benefits. If you have a warm places programme in the local area, letting people who are single elderly pensioners know about their local warm place is another element. You can do a lot with the data councils have. When they cannot, it is often down to capacity, which is where Councillor Fothergill’s comments about needing funding and ringfenced funding for benefits provision is important. There is a question about how the DWP wrote to 220,000 pensioners to encourage them to take up pension credits, but we think about 800,000 households are missing out on pension credit. What could you do to reach and target and communicate to that remaining gap? We think you would want to do that by linking HMRC and DWP data to look at occupational and private pensions. Then we have to look at HMRC’s interpretation of the legislation and whether a conservative interpretation of the gateways available to them will frustrate that policy initiative. The Universal Credit data is a bleaker picture. DWP shares data on about 35% of residents with local authorities and does not share the remaining 65%. We think the legal gateways are there and they could share it tomorrow and that would be important for targeting support, as Deven has talked about. If you want to reach people pre-retirement to make sure they have the savings and the financial support that they need, that they are adequately dealing with debt that they are raising, councils need to know about them. At the moment, those support services that they have can only be proactively targeted to the 35% of people they know. If I could ask the Committee to look at one thing, it would be whether we could rapidly get that data available to local authorities. If the direction is devolution, we are tying 65% of the hand behind the back. I will pause there. I can talk a little bit more if people want about some of the integration issues before, but I will limit my comments there.

Can I just follow up on that? Why is not more data shared, then? Why does DWP not share it?

It is not legal. It comes down to the legislation. It is complicated.

It is legislative. They could share but they do not have the powers at the moment. Is that what you mean?

We think they have the powers. It is a question of conservatism and how you interpret the powers, and it is a question of complexity. You have to navigate not just the legal power of the Welfare Reform Act but HMRC’s confidentiality provisions and also the GDPR provisions and so on. It is lot to get through and then they interpret it conservatively. We think they could share it. It is partly a quirk of history. When they first started sharing data, the limitations they imposed made sense. Universal Credit had just been introduced. Councils had the background and the principal reason for sharing were the people doing council tax support applications. That made sense at the time, but that was now over a decade ago and they have not gone back and revisited that. I would start there.

I have a set of questions around pension credit. The big event that has happened lately is winter fuel payment restrictions. What changes has that made to pension credit take-up, perhaps starting with you, David?

Part of our problem here is that as local authorities we are not fully in receipt of the data that tells us the number of people in our area who have lost out and who are receiving pension credits. We do need to fill that data gap and that is what Fabian was referring to. We have gone out and we have approached a lot of the people whom we believe will be affected, but it could be that they are not, and it could be that we are not targeting the right people. Unfortunately, we are working heavily to fill the gap, and we are using the household support fund to do that and other means to do that. We are using the levers at our disposal. However, this data sharing for us is absolutely critical. If we had clearer visibility on the people whom we were trying to help, we would be able to help them. We have been here before with the NHS. If you know anything about social care, the sharing of data between the NHS and social care was a big problem and still is a problem. We are getting better. It is similar here. If we had the data, as people on the ground, we could be doing it and that has impacted our ability to help the maximum number of people to take up that benefit.

I want to double down. We cannot emphasise it enough. If you wanted to double the impact or triple the impact of these take-up efforts tomorrow, sharing more of that data, particularly on working-age households, is one straightforward way it could be done. I will follow up on Fabian’s points briefly on why that is not happening today. If you wanted to double the impact, you could. There are three main challenges. One is a conservative view. The Government is risk averse. You do not get into trouble for not sharing the data. You do not get any rewards for sharing the data and delivering positive impacts. You may get into trouble. The incentives at a national Government level are somewhat skewed. Local government is also guilty of this at times, but there is more innovation and, when they see others move forward, you get to see that happen. That is one of the things that moves those levers. On the wider use, to emphasise the point of why we think it could be done, there are only two tests. One is whether there is a legal gateway for the data to be used for this broader purpose. The second one is proportionality. Is appropriate to share data on the wider group of people? There are legal gateways, certainly, that are already agreed. That is why you can share data on the 35% of households. The limit at the moment is partly proportionality. Again, going back to that conservative view, they have taken the view that you can share data when you know someone is in need. The data could be used to assess social care costs for an individual. However, to target support to people to prevent their social care costs from occurring in the first place, the Government have taken the view that that has not been proportional. That is counterproductive, candidly. This Government could be encouraged to take a shift in tone and perspective collectively. That would make a real difference in how data can be used to prevent issues and the challenges that we are talking about today from occurring in the first place. Again, like I said, we can go on about this point for hours, but I wanted to highlight that the legal gateways do exist. It is a departmental and ministerial view on proportionality. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? That is the question. Local authorities can be trusted to use that data effectively, as can other Departments across Government.

To clarify, it does get harder in healthcare, which is part of the reason why for the slight change in tone when you talk about health and social care. There are higher barriers to benefits uptake, as Deven described.

Following on, Age UK has said that recent public awareness campaigns have had limited impact. Do you agree with that? Why would that be the case? Deven, perhaps.

There has been a boost in applications for pension credit in response to this. When you look at the statistics, we are waiting for quite a few of them to be processed, which we can talk about in more detail, but the other point is that some of those have been made, and they have not been eligible. They have been made out of a, “May as well give it a go”, response and the success rate has fallen from about two third to just under half, from memory of the statistics. That is to be expected because it shows people are listening to the awareness campaigns. The question is whether it is reaching the right people. There is a difference between raising general awareness and being much more scientifically targeted in how you are identifying these people who are missing out. That is where there are partly data-led initiatives and partly working at a local level in partnership with local authorities and their local partners to reach those who are missing out. Again, I want to emphasise this point. It is not just about putting the money that they should be getting already into their pockets. It is about creating that sense of engaging in wider support services that might be necessary down the line, such as the social care support that is available only through local authorities, the potential to link in with public health teams around exercise at home or other types of initiatives that people might be able to benefit from and tackling social isolation. When we talk to the local authorities we work with that run campaigns, yes, they might help someone with an attendance allowance application or a pension credit application, but often what comes up in those conversations is that they might be struggling with debt, or they might be struggling with housing costs. The local authority can help them with those as well. However, if it is seen as just a data-driven exercise, it is transactional and it is not as transformational as it could be. That is probably the goal that collectively want to set ourselves because that is what makes the difference in someone’s life.

If I can just come in on the role of housing associations in this space, on the campaigns point, our members have—on a much smaller scale, of course—delivered a number of their own campaigns since the restriction of winter fuel payments to raise awareness of pension credit. They have done that through newsletters to all residents of pension age or through targeted letters at housing for older people schemes. They do it through drop-in services and face-to-face services. They have upped their activity on that. Broader than that and, I suppose, speaking to Deven’s point about targeting their approach, our members have a detailed understanding of who their residents are, of course. Clearly, they know where they live. They know their age. They also know quite a bit about their circumstances from quite in-depth contact and communications with them. Housing associations will often be the first point of contact for tenants experiencing financial difficulty, which may manifest itself in terms of people falling into rent arrears or people just seeking support. Our members are almost all experts in the welfare benefits system. Many of them will employ significant in-house teams of specialist people whose sole job is to help their residents understand the welfare benefits system and navigate the welfare benefits system and spend dedicated one-on-one time with individuals to help them to apply for or maintain a welfare benefit, which includes pension credit. As an example from the housing association I used to work at, Guinness, the proportion of those benefits gained that went towards meeting rent versus other things was roughly 60% helped to pay rent, but then on top of that significant monies were raised to help residents pay for other costs, essentials like food, heat, light and so on. It had a significant impact. That was a point to raise there about both the proactive targeted approach our members are taking and also that in-depth service that they provide.

If I may, I have some good examples of local authorities that have done some good work. I can quote places like Richmond, Wandsworth, Lewis and Eastbourne that are doing some impressive work in this area. As the Local Government Association, we have a role to play in helping to share that best practice, but to enable us to do that, we need capacity as well. Perhaps part of the Government’s thinking needs to be about how they encourage that best practice to be replicated across local authorities rather than keep reinventing it. Let us take the best examples and let us roll it out but give us the facility to be able to do that.

Thank you. Deven, you were talking a little earlier about the application process and the obstacles that may place in the path. Does it have a significant impact on take-up?

Yes, absolutely. There are three main barriers. One is awareness. Do they know that this support exists and, if they are aware, do they believe it might be relevant to them? The second point is administration effort. Is it achievable? Could I even complete this myself? Is it worth the effort given how much effort it takes? Then there is stigma. Do I feel like I am the sort of person who should do this? Dealing with stigma, we can make efforts in this place and others to change the language on that. Partly because of the pandemic and partly because the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, the tone around it is changing somewhat. People recognise that the system is there to support all of us. Maintaining that shift in direction is important and powerful. On the administration side, the benefit calculator we have on gov.uk might make a recommendation to four, five, six or seven types of support to someone who is not currently receiving anything. If they are claiming something, they might be claiming one or two. We have statistics on the number of people who say they are already receiving X and Y and who might be missing out on A, B and C. If you think about the effort of having to complete maybe five separate application forms, can we streamline that process? We are working on these kinds of things that I referenced earlier around whether it is for a social tariff for your water company or applying for a discretionary housing payment. Can you push the information from the calculator directly into the assessment form? We are doing that with a number of local authorities and utility companies now. From our side, some efforts are being made. The shift that we could see over a relatively short space of time is quite considerable to reduce the mental burden that people face in applying for these types of benefits and support. Again, the big opportunity is within the Government because that is where the bulk of the support is available. They have to be willing to accept the information that is sourced from elsewhere, provided it is substantially verified, and all the necessary checks are in place and being clear about what they want those to be. To use the example of pension credit, the Government felt they had to write to pensioners who were eligible. They would not use the data to say, “Here you go. Here is the support. We can tell you are eligible”. It could have been much more automatic. You might not even have had to apply. That is because the Government take a view that, first, you have to make an active application and, secondly, your information might not be up to date. They have an obligation to make sure it is paid out appropriately. That is an interesting question to explore. Where is that trusted view of a citizen’s perspective? My final point, if I may, quickly, is on governance. Whose data is it? Is it DWP and HMRC’s data to say what can and cannot be done with it? If it was shared with a customer and they gave their consent and said, “We want this data to be used for a wider range of purposes that fundamentally benefit them”, that is another approach, although, to be clear, we need a combination of both consent-driven and cross-Government governance changes.

You referenced earlier how more applications are going on for pension credit and also there is a surge in failed applications. It has hit 50% this year. The year before it was only 40% and the year before that 25%. We are seeing a sharp increase. What are the reasons for that? You might have thought that what happened with the winter fuel payment was driving more people to have a go, but the decline seems to have started before that was ever announced. What would you feel about that?

I have been following it more closely since the winter fuel payment announcement and that is definitely been a driver that you can say has pushed it even more in the direction of more people attempting to apply. A broader driver is that people are looking for support. They are struggling to pay their bills. If they think they might be eligible, it is important that they do. We should be encouraging them to. It is a shame. It is frustrating from an administrative perspective that people are applying, and they are not getting the support they need but, if some people are applying and they are getting the support they need, that is good. That is a good outcome. The wider point around something like pension credit is that being just outside the threshold and missing out on the other types of passported support that you can tap into can be difficult. However, if you can get that support, it is not just the pension credit. It is the winter fuel payment, the warm home discount, potentially council tax support, potentially housing benefit and the TV licence. There is a long list of other types of support that is there to help those on the lowest incomes. There is a question around how you make fairer the transition from being eligible for pension credits to being just above. The simplest way we will come on to, but there are efforts to potentially bring pension credit and housing benefit together. As someone who worked on Universal Credit, a Universal Credit style taper with some of those additional elements pulled into that overall pension credit amount would work and would be fairer than just a sharp cut off. If you are no longer eligible for pension credit, you also miss out on these other types of support, which are all things your constituents will be facing and dealing with and probably some will be frustrated about, some rightly so.

I agree with Deven. If more people are applying, you will get more people, unfortunately, who fail; that is just a mathematical equation. We can get more people to apply, but everybody will apply whether they have an opportunity or not. I do not see that as the problem. The problem is how many people are not applying. We have to keep tackling that.

From our members’ perspective on that, it has been less about failed applications, perhaps because of the generally lower levels of income in our households typically, but they have been saying instead that the length of the waiting period for the assessment for the pension credit claim to be made is in at least some instances exceeding the 50-day target, which is just an issue around capacity in the system. That is the main thing that they have been telling us and so the area to focus on is that capacity in the system to deal with the volume of applications.

Finally, have you seen any evidence that people who have been turned down for pension credit are then deterred, perhaps, from applying for other benefits? Are you seeing that at all?

The bigger challenge is those who do not respond at all to the pension credit prompt. It is reasonable to say and rightly we talk about the successes of helping those pensioners with £10 million of additional income each year into Londoners and achieving that three times, but that probably leaves similar amounts left on the table from pensioners who did not respond to that initial letter. Again, we are exploring why that is. I mentioned the IFS project. Another illustration of trying to increase that take-up rate has been introducing letters that have different languages on them, eight different languages on a subsequent letter to see if that has an impact on the response rate. Another thing we see that makes a difference is local authority follow-ups. Again, capacity is an issue there. Some authorities have more of that than others. The other final point is, as Fabian mentioned, we work with 100 local authorities. A lot of local authorities run their own approaches and campaigns as DWP has done as well. There are two challenges. One is a resource challenge. We find that some of the authorities that could most benefit are struggling the most financially and struggle to put the resource in place to run these campaigns—maybe some of your constituencies fall within that—and even though it creates a net positive economic impact, finding the resource in the first place to do this. We are trying to reduce the effort required to run these campaigns through analytics and technology and so forth. There is still a challenge for local authorities. The other point I would make is on governance. This is another point where the Committee can be clear on making a statement that the data can be used to help people to drive uptake campaigns. We saw a shift in that recently from DWP, to its credit, recognising clearly that this data can be used for pension credit and attendance allowance and other take-up campaigns. It has not gone as far to say the same for some of the other working-age campaigns and that has an impact because it allows local authorities, some of whom have already have the confidence and do this already and others who do not, to say, “It is fine. We can do this”. That is an important message to allow these take-up campaigns to reach more. I appreciate that that was not exactly the question you asked, but the bigger problem is those who are not responding. Making these take-up campaigns more effective is probably the bigger challenge.

It is difficult to assess those who fail but then no longer apply. It is difficult to assess, but we are more likely to assess it at a local level because we have people on the ground. Particularly in my own area, we have community agents and village agents who are constantly talking to people and so we are aware of people in these circumstances. You would never be aware of the examples that you were asking questions about centrally. That again illustrates how important the local knowledge, the local authorities and the role they play is in trying to get to those people and trying to avoid them going into their shell where they no longer apply. It is using that local knowledge.

If I can maybe tie together a response to a few of your questions, it is absolutely right to say that these mass marketing campaigns will be less effective than targeted communication. We see it in the data, but it is also hoping that someone listens to the podcast and goes, “That is me”, or sees the piece of paper on the community noticeboard. It will be less effective than a letter written to you saying, “Dear John Milne, we have looked at your data. We think you are eligible. Here is how to do it. If you need support, call this number”. The letter will be more effective, and it will mean that you are not wasting money trying to reach people who are not eligible. It also means that you are not getting people just trying and failing. We do not quantify the deterrence effect, but certainly it would be a setback to have spent all that effort applying for a benefit that you do not get. The more you can target it, absolutely, the more effective it is, and it saves costs everywhere in the system.

I will start with the risks and those are big risks. Revenue and benefit departments of local authorities are becoming more stretched, but a lot of their funding comes through their responsibilities on housing support. To move that away and centralise that would mean that a lot of those departments would become unviable and, therefore, we would risk other services. If it is a move that central Government are looking to do, they need to look at how the role of revenue and benefit departments within local authorities can be continued and enhanced. There is a risk for us.

From our members’ perspective, there are three key points. One, which you already referred to in your question, is around the pace of rollout given that this is to be introduced next year. Our members have ample experience of their residents moving across from legacy housing benefit and other benefits to Universal Credit and so have some experience of some of the challenges that that has presented. Nonetheless, we support the general direction of travel in terms of the simplification of the system. A couple of the specific risks will transfer over, as they did with Universal Credit, probably to pension credit as well. One is around clarity over who the benefit can be paid to. The great majority of our older residents living in as with many other older people will be in receipt of housing benefit. Who can legacy housing benefit be paid to? Can it be paid automatically, as housing benefit is, to the landlord? Will the process be similar to that of Universal Credit around alternative payment arrangements, which can be made in a range of circumstances but are more limited? That will be important to work through carefully, which is why the first point about pace matters. The other point is around service charge eligibility. We have seen with housing benefit and UC that not all service charges eligible to be paid through benefits have transferred across from housing benefit to Universal Credit. It is important, given the lower average household incomes of residents living in our homes, including our older residents, that that process is looked at carefully to make sure that residents moving across from the legacy system to pension credit are not left out of pocket in the transition simply because of a change from one system to the other. It is a vital point of principle in the new system that no individual should be left worse off by the change in system.

Let us talk about some of the positives briefly and then we will talk about some of the potential risks and things to be careful of. One potential positive could be the introduction of a taper to pension credit, as you have with housing benefit, as you have with Universal Credit. As people save more for their retirement and have a slightly greater income in retirement, they do not lose all the support as they go just above the threshold, which would definitely be a positive innovation. We have seen some of the negative impacts of not having that in place with the winter fuel payment withdrawal being quite a cliff edge. It is one less application and that can drive take-up as well. It certainly has the potential to drive take-up, and we have been talking about that a lot. For obvious reasons, that would help. It is important to say when we talk about the challenges that the proposals, for somebody who follows the area, are not exactly clear and it would be helpful to have the plans. The Government have pushed this forward from 2028 to 2026 as a potential time for rollout, it would be helpful to see more detail around those. That said, they are consulting with local authorities and others. When we talk to local authorities that are involved in those conversations, there is no sense that it needs to be local. Fundamentally, they want the best outcome for the resident, just like we all do. In some cases, though, what elements can be centralised? What will be centralised? Where will the administration sit, centrally or locally? That is one point, again, for the Government to be clearer on. The point, which I am sure that David will come in on as well, is that it is important that there is a plan and that we do not rush into it, as we saw with Universal Credit. That is the broader point, but it is not just about a transaction and how we get money into people’s pockets. When people get older, making sure they have access to the right housing support, making sure there is a connection into social care, making sure there is a connection into all of the other initiatives that happen through public health teams and others at a local level, making sure there is wider take-up if it is needed or wider energy-efficiency measures if they are struggling to pay, making sure there is a feed into that wider support, which there will be. We have been working to try to simplify the system for a long time. We cannot bring it all into one. Bits are always outside, and they generally get navigated towards or approached at a local authority level. There are definitely some potential benefits and some questions around exactly how it will be administered but, if you get it right, the opportunity would be around how to get central Government and local government working together to achieve the best outcome for the residents. That will probably take maybe a bit more time to get right.

The only thing to add is, if you are going to centralise it, let us work out the date and make sure the local authorities keep the view on the pensioners because, if you want this wrapped around, integrated service and then you suddenly remove one of the most important data sources on who they are, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Yes, there are some lessons learned through the rollout of Universal Credit around some of this. Certainly, the Departments and the officials I speak with are much more aware, if they are rolling out a new, big change again, how they might approach it differently. It is important they are given the space and time to communicate and articulate those plans and go through maybe a more rigorous process around the scrutiny that you and others—and ourselves as well—will certainly put around it. It is important to see the plans well in advance of any rollout so that the wider stakeholders can feed into them. That is probably the point to say.

In terms of conversations we have had with officials on this, they very much reflect the points that I have made, in fact, and so those would be the key points that we have fed in. More broadly, we have worked constructively with DWP for many years on the rollout of Universal Credit and on the development of the landlord portal, which is an important tool. We welcome the opportunity to keep having that level of access and that level of constructive conversation with Government as the pension credit and housing benefit merger comes on stream.

We have a good working relationship with DWP, and it has developed and has become increasingly positive. Representing those views will help us to find the right solution. We just need to make sure that we get the opportunity to keep putting those views forward in consultation and through meetings. We will keep doing that.

Like others, there is an awful lot going on in this space, as I am sure you are all learning, to try to stay on top of. The point I am making is that not enough work has been done in this space. While we are still completing the managed migration onto Universal Credit, that is still focusing minds in the Department, along with other challenges around the winter fuel payments and some of the other issues that you as a Committee will have been looking at. Things around the spending review need to be sorted out. It is not appropriate to set red lines until the Government have had a chance to put forward what their plans are. As I say, the main challenge here is to allow enough time for those plans to be put forward and for those plans to be scrutinised. I would be keen to do more work in this area, but there are so many other areas to look at in detail. You could probably speak with the LGA and with the National Housing Federation about developing more of a collective view. Just to second that point, DWP is engaging with local authorities on this and so there is a forum where some of these issues get discussed. Again, those plans are not clear or set in stone yet and so there is nothing to report at this point.

Look, I want to thank you all for your testimony. An issue that has come around again and again is data integration. It sounds like that sits at the heart of much of this discussion. We are all aware of the impact data integration can have. I remember many years ago I worked on some stuff looking at the potential for integration to drive predictive analytics and picking up people at risk of dropping out of school years before that risk was apparent to the education system. That is a well-established part of our toolkit and is something we need. You have also mentioned the fact that you can see the data on only 35% of people. I suppose I would like to start with what data you would need. There is the maximalist, perfect world but, in terms of minimum viable products to be able to make a real difference, what data would you need?

I will start on that from a local authority point of view. We need to use the withdrawal of the winter fuel payments as an example. We needed there clear visibility on who would continue to receive and who would have them withdrawn. That was because that was our marketplace that we needed to go out to and talk to. It is about understanding the information that is held centrally and how we can use that information to enhance people’s quality of life. It will be different for different things, but there needs to be some agreement on the level of data sharing.

I will push you, David, a tiny bit because that is broad—that is saying all central Government data. Again, coming back to minimum viable product, clearly, as Fabian has previously outlined, there is a huge difference between health data, for which there are rightly high barriers to sharing, and other forms of data. Again, pushing you, at a granular level, what is the minimum you would need to be able to have a differential impact? I would like to get at that. I get the broad thing about central, but this is a practical question. What pools of data and what data sharing agreements or framework changes are required and how do the computers talk to each other? We need to drill down a level. Deven, I saw you had your hand up.

The biggest thing you this Committee could call for to make the biggest difference would be to get all Universal Credit data into the hands of local authorities tomorrow or by April, let us say. Again, it is the biggest impact for the least effort because the legal gateway already exists. The mechanism to share already exists. Our view is a view on what is proportional. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? That could be a ministerial decision. Going to your point around minimum viable products, other approaches that lead towards holy grail types of initiatives may get there eventually. They need to be achieved step by step. This is the first step towards something like that. The use cases for it are the ones that we have discussed today such as take-up. The memorandum of understanding allows data to be used for homelessness prevention in its broader sense. The DDP has taken a reasonably pragmatic view of recognising local authorities can be trusted to make decisions around how the data can be used, provided they can identify a suitable legal gateway, to its credit. It is an area where we have made the most progress in terms of how data can be used. Increasing the flow of data to local authorities probably has the biggest impact for the least effort. I will probably stop there. There is more to it.

I would like to get others’ views and, David, also to come back to you on this, but I have questions on that. First, what would be the second step? If step one is UC, what is step two? This is exactly to your point about staircasing to something broader. Secondly, even within that, what data would you require? For instance, I could see a massive data difference between saying, “I want to know if person X is in receipt of a benefit”, which is sensitive personal data that would be covered by GDPR and other things, and saying, “I want to understand their actual income”, which would be a much higher barrier and would be much more intrusive. This is not just what data do you need but how narrow could its scope be?

I will let David maybe talk a bit about the trusted third-party model to get around some of those challenges. You do not want to release all that data to everyone. You cannot let it be a free for all. It will not happen, realistically, but there are mechanisms by which data can be used and accessed to allow those broader questions to be asked and answered. I will touch briefly on the second step. If you had data on everyone eligible for Universal Credit, that allows you to double or triple the impact of the use cases that are already being delivered today because you have achieved that. We are already delivering those on a third of the data. If you have double or triple the data, you could double or triple the impacts potentially if you reach similar numbers of eligible households. The next ask would be—and again, you always need a clear purpose—to allow that data to be linked with other datasets to achieve, say, homelessness prevention or to lower social care costs or to deal with the early determinants of health.

That is the broader integration thing that I am pushing. I suppose one of the reasons I am pushing is because you get specific enough and then you can talk about the practical steps. I suppose I have one other question and, Fabian, I would love to bring you in. That is UC, but we are talking here also about pensioners. That deals only with those on the approach road to pensionable age. What other data would we need to deal with those who are in the stock rather than the flow?

I will let Fabian take the first part and maybe mop something up.

Yes. There is a data share called the Universal Credit data share. At the moment, it would be about removing the restriction or the filter, essentially, about who is in there, but allow all the people in the Universal Credit databases to be shared with the local authorities. That would include income data, but there are restrictions on how that income data would be used. We are not proposing as a first step that you would relax those restrictions. I wanted to come back to your point on exactly what data. It would be that, Chair. You could do some constrictions. Would you link it to people with housing costs or owner-occupiers? A fair amount of support is targeted towards people in homelessness, but the counterpoint to that is this Government have a big growth agenda and has employment support. One of the uses of this data, for example, would be to identify people who are long-term sick due to health issues—you do not need to know what it is, but there are programmes around those—or working parents who are underemployed, or you could be looking at people who are NEETs. The sharing of the data would allow all of that. That is why you would not necessarily want to restrict it only to people with housing costs. On your second question on pensioners, Deven, do you want to pick up the pensioner point on data? Do you want to pick up on that?

Yes, sure. I guess the broadest point is that this data can be used to improve the effectiveness of any other Government programme by just identifying the people who could most benefit and letting them know. It is again that point around non-targeted outreach versus targeted outreach being so much more effective. That is the broad point on how capturing a greater proportion of the population through this data set could be incredibly powerful. You are right. You asked me what the one dataset is, and it is the working-age cohort where you can make the biggest difference, but going on to pension age briefly, there are probably two broad potential challenges that you should probably ask as questions because I do not have the answer, to be completely candid. The first is what the restrictions are around allowing the right level of health data to be joined with the right level of benefit data to be able to determine the right level of support for those households. It is quite complex, but that is one for the Committee. We are happy to spend more time with you on it, but you are asking for a different thing there. On the wider awareness of pension credit, let us say, to go back to one of the things the Committee has spent quite a bit of time on today, through the housing benefit data you can identify maybe 150,000 of the 700,000 people missing out on pension credit. For the other 550,000, what can you do? The Government have a dataset on state pensions and everyone who gets a state pension below the threshold where they may potentially be eligible for pension credit. It has the risk of being quite nontargeted because you could have a small state pension and potentially other occupational pensions, but you could ask why we do not try that and see how effective it is.

Playing devil’s advocate, you are saying that for this cohort, it is not clear that there is any magic bullet dataset, particularly if you are worried not just about reaching the poorest pensioners because there is a benefit receipt for them—those who are already in. For those who are not already in, it is quite difficult because the dataset you do have, state pension, is universal by definition and absent HMRC data, which you will never get, you do not have an overall picture of these people’s incomes.

The “never get” is for the—but I agree. It is definitely a big ask and rightly a big ask and a high threshold.

HMRC is rightly protective of that data for all the obvious reasons and so that feels like the highest barrier. HMRC has traditionally been difficult. That, I suppose, leads me neatly to my next question. You said that there are third-party data sharing agreements. It is not about what data and what blockages exist because we have touched on them quite a lot already. Where do the blockages exist? For instance, there is a DHSC issue and there is clearly an HMRC/HMT issue, but those are well understood and long established. Especially for your first steps, where do the blockages lie? Where are the barriers?

David, apologies; I had forgotten the second question earlier. Yes, HMRC data is tougher to get. Provisions to the Welfare Reform Act 2012 allow HMRC to share data with DWP and so it may be that either you can do it as long as it is a DWP-led initiative, harder for local authorities but more possible there, or you could look at an intermediary or trusted third-party model where effectively you say that one organisation or entity acts as a data processor to combine the two sets of data and then reach out and the data is, therefore, never shared across the boundary. You are right to have spotted the difficulty with HMRC. I encourage the Committee to see if there is a way through. With regards to the blockages on Universal Credit data share, the two organisations that would need to agree to share the data would be DWP and HMRC. They would both need to be satisfied that the proportionality and necessity tests were met. They would want to engage local authorities to build the evidence case, which we already have more or less on the stocks, to justify and go through the paperwork and agree the MOU. They would also need to do the technical work of sharing the data, which would require some funding and allocation of technical resource. There will also be an internal departmental question about whether that is prioritised. Within that, I would call out that there is always an easy and expedient way to do things and there is the long gold-plated way of doing things. Our encouragement generally would be to not let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Can you use existing ways of sharing data, as imperfect as they are, instead of going and spending years coming up with a perfect way to share data?

That brings me to my last question because I am conscious of time. David, I am particularly looking to you. The LGA has called in the past for a clear legislative framework on this, but I suppose reflecting also on Fabian’s counsel to us to not let the best be the enemy of the good and to use the practical tools, what change is needed? Again, what would a minimum viable product look like? Given that, is it possible to do it without legislative change? Legislation is lovely in theory. The problem is, for a start, even if everyone agrees, it probably takes years. I suppose the question is how much we need it and what can we, maybe with the tools we have, do now.

. We are working particularly well with DWP on the memorandum of understanding that currently exists. There is still distance to go, but if we want to expand that memorandum of understanding and we need to make additional specific data available, we will need a new legislative framework. That is very much what the LGA is calling for. Local authorities are willing to play that role and to accept the responsibility for taking data in a confidential matter, but we need to have that level of relationship and level of legislative backup that allows us to do that. At the moment, that does not exist.

Thank you. Alistair, do you have any views?

I am not an expert on this. With regard to the broader data points, given that we are talking about a particular cohort of residents living in our homes, many of whom are already in receipt of housing benefit, we also have our own datasets around take-up of repairs, how often you contact your landlord, your level of rent arrears and so on. Our members will use that data to assess whether they think individuals are likely to be at risk of financial distress or otherwise and will proactively contact them if that is the case. It is a slightly different scenario for our members.

If I can come in, for people who do not know, the MOU is between DWP, HMRC and the local authorities about what data can be shared and for what purpose. It is not simply that a law needs to be on the books; there needs to be a series of pieces of paperwork behind it, one of which is the MOU, which sets out what the data is shared for. We think the Universal Credit data sharing can be done under existing legislation and existing legal powers. In fact, some of the powers are already in the MOU. I do not think, for the sharing of Universal Credit data, that any legislative change is needed. I do not think the existing MOU covers even half of the legal powers in the Welfare Reform Act regulations from 2012. There is a lot of opportunity to allow the data to be used for purposes for which the legislation has already been passed years ago. That is not a legislative change, it is reflecting the legislation in the practices, and that is worth doing. However, if you are asking for priorities, it would be to share the data under existing powers. The answer depends on what the ambition is. You talked about prevention, and you talked about having holistic care and a holistic view of people, and we have talked about the role of local authorities, potentially, as being the area where government is joined up. If that is the ambition, it will require looking at the legislation behind it. I could not tell you whether that is secondary legislation under DEA or whether that is primary legislation. It is very difficult, with the way things are interpreted conservatively and under the constrictions of the GDPR, to do preventative work and to look at population-level outreach. If you want to move away from a case-by-case basis to sharing, you do need to look at something legislative.

Returning again to the application process, has any assessment been made of the availability and effectiveness of face-to-face support in making a claim? That is particularly in the context of Age UK, which very much argues that direct support from either a local authority benefit team, itself or another supplier is necessary—particularly when you consider that for pension credit you might need to go through an attendance allowance application first to make yourself eligible, and that is notoriously the most difficult of the bunch to get through. Do you think face-to-face support would be valuable and how available is it? Perhaps we will start with David.

I am not aware of any analysis that says if there has been at least a better take-up or not. Subjectively, you assume that if you sit down with somebody who can help you through the form, it is going to lead to a much more positive outcome. The concern is that with the cohort of people that we are talking about there is a lot of digital exclusion, which cannot be ignored. Therefore, forms and administration being online does immediately create a barrier that a lot of people find very difficult. Face-to-face is important. Therefore, it comes back to that local authorities, local voluntary groups or Citizens Advice could provide that resource, but it is about knowing the people and being able to get to the people to provide that resource to. It is very much about recognising the restrictions on digital access but also recognising that there is an opportunity to provide the support with sustainable funding, but we need to know where those people are and how we can help them.

From our perspective, our members will offer advice to residents face-to-face, over the phone, over email and in a range of other digital channels. Certainly, for some residents the digital approach works fine, but perhaps for residents with more vulnerabilities—and there are proportionately more living in social housing—we know that it is more effective when more in-depth support is offered. That does not necessarily have to be face-to-face. It can be done over the phone because you can still spend significant amounts of time over the phone talking somebody step-by-step through a process. It can be either over the telephone or in person and it is often a case of assessing what works best for that particular resident, but what is crucial is the amount of time you are able to dedicate to an individual to guide them through a process.

We know, from doing take-up work with different local authorities that take different approaches, that you see differences in response rates. From that approach, you can see very clearly that you build up to that face-to-face support. We know that repeat campaigns are more effective than one-off campaigns, and you can see this in the data. Some authorities that have run repeat campaigns for pension credit still get good numbers claiming each time they run a subsequent one. Following up with phone calls two weeks later, or soon after—if you follow up three months late, that is too late—there is an improvement in that response rate. With text messages, slightly less so; I think there is a slight concern around scams. Having that connection with an individual helps, and then you build up from that to face-to-face support. If you can encourage more people to claim without needing that support— and some people either have the wherewithal themselves or have access to support through friends and family to help them complete these assessments, which is good for them—you are creating maybe more capacity within the sector that remains to help those who need that help and support. You just underlined that point. There definitely is a role for people to have access to help them through these processes, certainly while they remain as complex and complicated as they currently are.

I myself sat in on a session with Age UK with a client a few weeks ago, and I must admit I thought the help was very necessary. Is there a case for introducing something along the lines of the Help to Claim scheme that is used for Universal Credit, although that does seem to have moved to telephone support rather than face-to-face now?

Certainly. I would have thought that level of support is quite important. If I can speak for my own personal division that I represent, which is a very rural area, people live two miles from the nearest neighbour in the depths of the Levels of Somerset and it is very difficult to get to those people. If you do not have the resources to put onto the road to be able to go out to visit, you have to rely upon a telephone. However, the key is that you still need to get that person to make contact with that system, or that system has to make contact with those individuals. You need to find a way to do that. Interestingly, on the Tube this morning I noticed an advert—I am not sure if it is because I was coming here or because I just noticed the advert—that said, “Do your parents a favour and tell them about pension credit”. I thought that was just a different way in, and if I had seen that on the Tube I would have taken that away and done something with it. It is finding those different ways in.

Straightforwardly, yes, I do think there is a case for that. It is similar to the support our members provide. Yes, I think there is a case.

There is a pension credit helpline. You can apply over the phone, for example, for that space. The argument I would make is the trade-off between, say, something centrally run or centrally commissioned, and local authorities or local areas having funding to provide that support through their own mechanisms and having some evaluation mechanisms. We did some work on an evaluation approach to local welfare assistance for the GLA recently, which talked about how you can standardise these schemes a little bit to make it a bit easier to evaluate which ones are having a greater impact. That is probably where scepticism around funding things locally comes from. If you can introduce it with the right level of accountability, that feels like potentially a better approach to me. I do think local approaches have that transformative impact. That is probably a better way to go than just completing an application form, as if that is the only goal to achieve with that individual.

I am conscious of time, but to what extent do we know what needs to be done to improve the take-up of the attendance allowance, and how do the issues needing to be addressed there differ from those for means-tested benefits?

We wrote a report on unclaimed attendance allowance recently and we have just run an attendance allowance take-up campaign. We have just got the results across four boroughs in London, and we are running it across 20 currently. Our analysis found that over a million pensioners are likely to be missing out on over £5 billion of unclaimed attendance allowance. I have not seen any other figures out there and DWP may well challenge them, but I think we did that by looking at the ages of cohorts and health issues for people among that cohort that might make them eligible for attendance allowance. We do not know whether they hit that threshold, but that is the potential that is going unclaimed. In terms of driving take-up, it is more challenging than pension credit, to be completely candid, because we do not know if they have the conditions that let them qualify for attendance allowance. In the campaign we ran—I can share some initial results with the Committee today and I will follow up with a published report; there is a very late draft that I looked at yesterday—the criteria by which we identified pensioners who might be suitable were all the pensioners aged 80-plus, living alone, who did not have any disability benefits. They did not have a carer, and you did not have the complexity of potentially having DLA or PIP, which they might be keeping from being of working age. They are probably better off on those benefits so we did not want to complicate that group. Across four of five boroughs, we had a take-up rate, on average, of 5%, one in 20, which feels low, but in terms of economic impact the economic return was 40 to one. The additional pension credit that was claimed subsequently was £40 for every £1 spent on the campaign, which is quite considerable—and again, that is in year one. If you factor in the life expectancy of that individual, it is going to be considerably more than that, and again that targeting approach can be refined. The other point I would make is there were some significant differences in the response rate. You have 5% on average but the best-performing got almost 15%. Again, this is still relatively untargeted. With pension credit, we know that person is eligible—”Please apply”—and we are getting 30%. Some of what we are doing is raising awareness among people who might benefit from it later as well. We are looking at a very short timeframe. It is an interesting and powerful campaign to scale across 20 boroughs and potentially more broadly across the hundred that we work with, simply because there is a more direct relationship between attendance allowance and social care. The benefit to local authorities of running attendance allowance campaigns is that an individual who also has subsequent social care needs—that could be a one-to-one. That means they have the ability to pay for that social care themselves, which they did not have before. That could well have ended up as an additional pressure on that household, potentially debt for the local authority and certainly a worse outcome in general. That is what that funding is there for, to help people pay for the support that they need. There is a very small nuance, which I did not realise until I started looking into this field in detail, which is that sometimes the assessment for social care costs assumes they are getting that support but does not make sure that they are getting that support. Because attendance allowance affects everyone, I can be playing football with someone one weekend and they will talk about it with their parents. It is an interesting point to raise. “You might be eligible for this.” I have had that experience, where someone I play football with has helped their dad to apply. You make a big impact on them, their family, and the outcomes that they can expect for their loved ones. It is a powerful area. Again, the challenge around targeting it is that we do not have that connection between health and benefits.

Thank you for that. I did have a question on how you produced the estimates of the amount unclaimed, but I think you have answered that. Would you like to see the Government produce official estimates of the amounts unclaimed?

Sure. In general, we try to use government estimates where they are available. We produced a report that estimated the overall levels of unclaimed means-tested benefits as being £23 billion. That excludes things like attendance allowance, personal independence payments, discretionary support like the household support fund, discretionary housing payments and other things that are discretionary. The potential—which could be getting into the pockets of those who need it most in a more effective way—is considerable. We are talking, just from that figure, about £30 billion or more. It is an area the Government can look at to produce those estimates. As I say, there is something about setting targets and measuring things well, and something about doing something about it. We are called “Policy in Practice”. Over time, I have leaned more heavily into practice because that is where you make a bigger difference. Obviously, that needs to come alongside the policy impacts and change to enable that to happen, and that is why it is brilliant to have the opportunity to be here today.

Thank you. To David, following the change in winter fuel payment eligibility, pensioner organisations have expressed particular concern about two groups of pensioners, the first being eligible non-recipients of pension credit, as well as those just above the pension credit level. To what extent has this change affected the way local authorities are administering the household support fund and how variable is that?

The household support fund has enabled us to fill some of those gaps, particularly with those people who we were very aware of just missing because they are just above the limit. That fund has given us discretionary decision-making as to where we can use it, which has been important. I have examples of authorities that have used it very well and the number of people who they have helped. Our big concern about the household support fund is that it will disappear next year. It is due to come to an end. If it comes to an end, we will fall off a cliff. It needs to be maintained, or it needs to be replaced with something that gives us the ability to fill that gap. It has been critical to a lot of people just on the edge.

Thank you. Perhaps, bearing in mind the time constraints, you would be able to provide those examples to us in writing.

I would be happy to.

That is great, thank you very much. In the interests of time, I am going to ask if I could contact members about this one final question around local welfare support and the future plans around that. I would be very grateful if you might write to us, but we will contact you specifically about that question. I thank all of the evidence providers this morning. Thank you so much. It has been a really informative session.