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Wigan Council Benefits Maximisation

Introduction

This is an example of financial wellbeing work carried out by Wigan Council that was enabled by intelligent use of data to prioritise households for welfare support between October 2023 and April 2025 that the SAVVI project has learnt from. This learning example sets out what Wigan Council did and why, who was involved, how they used data and technology and what they achieved.

Project Participants

The project was led by Wigan Council. The council’s internal Local Welfare Support Team commissioned the Performance and Insight Unit (PIU), also within Wigan Council, to deliver the project, and were the main internal client for the work the PIU delivered. Members of Wigan Council’s Customer Experience and Support teams were also involved in contacting residents who had been prioritised by the project for offers of income maximisation and management of household costs, by the Income Maximisation Team. The council’s Information Governance Team oversaw data privacy arrangements.

Wigan Council used data for which it was the sole controller, such as council tax addresses, and records of welfare benefits support work as well as statistical modelling data that was supplied to the council under a usage licence from Experian about likely household income. It was important to Wigan Council that no third parties were asked to process personally identifiable data that it controlled, to reduce data protection risks. Furthermore, ownership over the data model allowed for flexibility and customisation. This agility is crucial for responding to evolving needs and ensuring that the data products remain relevant and, for this purpose, all data processed as part of the project were stored on access controlled SQL data servers that were hosted on Wigan Council premises, significantly reducing the risk of data breaches and safeguarding residents' privacy.

Support services were provided directly by Wigan Council’s internal Income Maximisation Team, so no referrals to third parties for support were made before residents had given consent for this. Households that had been referred internally to the Income Maximisation Team were signposted to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) claim forms to increase their welfare benefit income.

The Vulnerability Being Addressed

The vulnerability that the project was set up to address was:

HOUSEHOLD POVERTY

This was defined as those households with low financial resilience, those potentially at a higher risk of financial distress because of a combination of low household income and increased expenditure due to increases in the cost of living.

The Wigan Borough has a low wage economy locally, which affects people who might not claim all of the welfare benefits to which they are entitled. This, combined with rising bills for utilities and household necessities, led to concerns that local households would experience financial crisis, an outcome the council wanted to avoid.

A risk factor defined to prioritise such families was the proportion of households’ income that they were spending on food and heating combined. The project, therefore, aimed to use data about household income, welfare benefit claims and expenditure to prioritise support for those most at risk of financial crisis.

Also, it was known by many services the council delivers, such as adult and children’s social care and waste management, that poverty and financial distress is a driver of demand for services, so the council was also looking for a system benefit from the work that could be realised, in time, as service cost avoidance.

The project aligns with broader statutory responsibilities and powers that local authorities have to support vulnerable residents. For instance, local authorities in the UK, including Wigan Council, have general duties under the Local Government Act 2000 to promote the economic, social, and environmental well-being of their areas.

Additionally, the Care Act 2014 places duties on councils to provide information and advice to help individuals prevent or delay the need for care and support, which can include financial advice and income maximisation.

Activities Undertaken

The activity was part of the “Here for You” project, which initially ran a campaign using flyers, leaflets and other media forms and in libraries to raise awareness of the support available to claim (additional) welfare benefits. However, the welfare benefits service did not know who was at risk and therefore who to target with an offer of support.

The council were also aware that overly burdensome application processes meant residents didn’t always make claims and missed out on funding they may otherwise be entitled to. No matter how much promotional material is sent via the post, social media or wider communication channels not all eligible residents contact the council to claim support. Knowing the traditional methods weren’t having the desired impact, the council recognised that unlocking the power of our data to provide bespoke, targeted support would be key moving forward.

The council’s strategic objective that the project aimed to contribute to was: “Create fair opportunities for all children, families, residents and businesses”, in keeping with the key missions of the council’s corporate agenda - Progress with Unity.

The welfare benefits service had extensively used the Household Support Fund to help households who were in financial distress, but this risked creating a dependency on a temporary funding solution so needed to be mainstreamed into supporting residents with claiming other welfare benefits via DWP/HMRC.

It was also necessary to overcome the stigma of “being on benefits” with residents saying things like:

“I’m not getting handouts from the state”

“I won’t be entitled to anything”

Prior to the project, the Welfare Benefits Service had delivered some in person engagement at Community Venues and Family Hubs but were limited on who they could engage with outside of these settings.

The challenge set for the PIU by the welfare benefits service was: “Tell me who these people are and where they are, so we can determine how we are going to help them”. The PIU tested the data flow to produce lists of households to be prioritised. Three team members were taken from Customer Services out of their day jobs to run a pilot test to see if the risk model was effective by contacting a small sample. This demonstrated that there were a sufficient proportion of positive hits of priority households and evidenced the need to scale up the project.

Once people had been prioritised using the data model they were contacted using customer insight data to identify their preferred contact channel. Because the Experian data model was statistical, rather than records based, council staff had to communicate sensitively with residents. In particular, they avoided saying to residents that they used their own records of the resident to prioritise them for welfare benefits support.

As part of the pilot, no inbound referrals from external partners were made to the council as part of the project and only internal referrals to the welfare benefits service following initial conversations with residents. Welfare services do accept referrals, but these were dealt with outside the project team.

The welfare benefits service firstly offered a needs assessment to examine the potential for eligibility to a number of unclaimed welfare benefits. The service also explored residents’ household expenditure to identify ways in which this could be reduced. This work was less formal than the welfare benefits claims support and the results were not always recorded in case notes.

Once eligibility for unclaimed welfare benefits had been established with residents, external signposting to DWP/HMRC services and support to claim took place, alongside the processing of and referrals to internal reductions or benefits such as Council Tax Support, Household Support Funding, Discretionary Housing Payments or locally administered Council Tax discounts and reductions.

Outcomes Framework

The two key metrics from the service were:

Increase in household income

Reduction in household costs

The increase in household income through claiming (additional) welfare benefits was formally measured and reported on. The reduction in household costs was not formally measured but residents supported by the project informally reported reductions. It was also hoped that demand on other services known to be driven by poverty and financial distress would be avoided such as NHS services and social care, but these were not formally recorded as part of the project.

The data system was configured to be updated daily, including outcomes, but the welfare benefits service did not request a dashboard so this was not developed for them.

As part of the project, the PIU also used the Experian household data to visualise UPRNs by LSOA so concentrations of cases could be seen on a map, as shown in Figure 1, but the welfare benefits service did not need to use this facility, as they were focused on finding individual households in need of support rather than neighbourhood campaigns.

Figure 1: Map Dashboard of Household Outcomes

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Data and Technology

Before the project, the council held data on administering Council Tax and benefits, such as the Household Support Fund, and records from its welfare benefits service but did not have any indicative details of residents’ household incomes. In response to this, the council bought an Experian dataset on household finances, which was matched to other data at a household level using the UPRN.

Council Tax address data was used to build a spine to identify households. The four data sources were combined to produce a single view of the resident and develop the list of prioritised households. These were:

Council Tax Reduction records

Benefit take up data from the Welfare Benefits service

Experian modelled household income data

Customer insight data on preferred contact channels

These are explained further in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Data Sources

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The project did not produce a documented risk model but the data processing model is contained in the SQL code that is used to update the list of prioritised households. This enabled transparency and algorithm improvement cycles, which were made by looking at matching statistics and facilitated assessments of data quality.

1 million lines of data from over 153,000 households were ingested to the model, which was automatically refreshed daily using SQL. The output was a single data application accessed by the Welfare Benefits Service team.

Technology Use

The council had deployed

Alteryx⁠

- a low code analytics environment, which was used to develop the necessary data flows and analytical models. This has since been replaced by a SQL data model, with the data stored and processed in the council’s SQL data repository. The flow of data was automated, allowing it to be refreshed in seconds, to release PIU resources to work on other projects.

Data Privacy

All data was stored and processed using on-premises architecture so no third-party data processors were involved as there were concerns about external data processing. The council’s Information Governance (IG) team were keen to minimise data privacy risks.

The lawful basis for processing the data, authorised by the council’s IG team, was a task carried out in the public interest (Public Task), i.e.

Article 6(1)(e) of the UK GDPR⁠

gives data controllers a lawful basis for processing where:

“processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller”

The council updated its privacy notices to make the use of data for income maximisation explicit. Resident feedback has been overwhelmingly positive about the reuse of data to find and support vulnerable people, as set out in the

Resident Feedback⁠

section below. This demonstrates that this is within residents’ expectations of the council’s functions.

Services Offered

Once households had been prioritised for contact about support with household income and expenditure, letters, emails, push notifications and targeted outbound telephony were used to invite residents to have a conversation about income maximisation in their localities. Alongside these targeted contacts with prioritised households, the Welfare Benefits Service and Comms teams communicated the offer of an income maximisation service to the prioritised population segments. In addition, there was a wider campaign to raise awareness of the service to reduce reluctance to take up the service as fear of scams, etc.

The single view of the resident that had been created, allowed for a targeted approach to income maximisation and support, using data to target our most vulnerable. The council used direct telephone contact where contact details were held, with support to maximise income provided over the phone.

Where telephony was unavailable or unsuitable, with face-to-face support required, residents booked bespoke appointments or were invited into Income Maximisation events in their localities – Libraries, Community Venues and Family Hubs. Residents were contacted via multiple channels including phone, letter, email, text message, dependent on the data held, designed to maximise take up and response.

Once households had taken up the offer of income maximisation support, they were offered a follow-on service in conjunction with both internal and external partners, to reduce household income, including:

Energy efficiency measures & Smart meters, energy debts and advice

Fuel options, Energy tariffs and switching options & Energy grants

Campaigns matching current/seasonal demand with supply i.e. School Uniforms

Outcomes and Achievements

Initial expectations were that total household income could be increased across the Wigan Borough by up to £1m. However, the project hugely exceeded these initial expectations and by October 2024, with the project operating for just over 12 months, it had raised household incomes across the borough by a total of £4.5m per year. By the end of May 2025 the project had been responsible for over 7,000 awards totaling in excess of £9m per year.

These outcomes are broken down by claim type, amount and number of claims in Table 1. However, this outcome data is incomplete because it does not include the outcomes of the support provided to these households to reduce their expenditure, so the real world impact is greater than this.

Table 1: Household Welfare Benefit Claims Outcomes by Benefit Claimed

Benefit Type

Value of Claims

Claim count

Attendance Allowance

£4,229,364.49

764

Carers Allowance

£73,725.10

Child Disability Living Allowance

£43,323.65

Council Tax Reduction

£507,514.41

692

Disability Living Allowance

£154,392.59

Discount and Exemptions

£225,454.33

155

Discretionary Housing Payment

£127,289.95

114

Employment and Support Allowance

£34,579.36

HACT

£25,333.00

Household Support Fund

£100,315.00

4,248

Housing Benefit

£619,289.71

214

New Style ESA

£28,915.25

Pension Credit

£1,940,308.32

409

Pension Credit COL payment

£14,384.00

Personal Independence Payment

£524,014.32

Severe Disability Premium (SDP)

£5,216.00

Single Person Discount

£212,572.95

245

Universal Credit

£105,058.75

Universal Credit Limited Capability for Work

£88,842.91

Total

£9,059,894.09

7,276

There are no rows in this table

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The project is now forecast to hit over £10m uplift in total household income across the borough.

Here for You is making a lasting difference in residents’ lives—offering emotional reassurance, practical support, and financial relief during challenging times.

Its compassionate, stigma-free approach helps people feel respected and supported. By easing financial pressures, it reduces stress and anxiety, giving families greater peace of mind. Friendly, approachable staff and partners create a welcoming space where residents feel heard and valued.

The campaign has delivered tangible results:

Families have redirected money toward essential needs.

Expert advice has helped residents uncover unclaimed benefits, manage finances, and build resilience.

Guidance on energy efficiency and budgeting has empowered people to take control of their household finances.

Resident Feedback

The real impact is best expressed by those it has helped:

“After only an hour of our time, I was walking down the hill in Believe Square with tears running down my face knowing that financially, my life had just changed. I feel like a human being with dignity again.”

One family shared how support for their elderly father led to a noticeable improvement in his well-being—highlighting the link between financial support and mental health.

Wigan Council’s Income Maximisation Team regularly receives heartfelt messages like:

“Thank you so much for your amazing help and support—the results have been totally life-changing. Not all superheroes wear masks and capes.”

These stories are a powerful reminder of how Here for You uplifts, reassures, and restores dignity. Attending a drop-in event can be life-changing—and the council has captured video testimonies to show just that.

Some households were supported to claim over £20,000 per year in additional income. Below is an example of a couple that were prioritised for an invitation to a local income maximisation workshop, based on the use of data.

Here for you - Colin and Linda's story.png

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Colin and Linda Taylor thought they weren’t entitled to any financial support until they received an invitation to a Wigan Council income maximisation workshop at the Life Centre. Initially hesitant, they attended and were guided by a helpful staff member through the benefits application process. Within an hour, they discovered they qualified for financial assistance they never knew existed. This support transformed their lives, allowing them to afford new glasses and clothing for the first time in years. Colin and Linda now encourage others to seek advice, as the process is simple, risk-free, and can be truly life-changing.

Quote from Colin and Linda:

“Life changing. I can’t think of a better word than life changing.”

A video of this case study is available

Here for you - Colin and Linda's story 💛⁠

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Other testimonies are available here:

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Here for You - William and Pamela's story 💛⁠

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Here for you - Raymond and Margaret's story 💛⁠

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The team’s success has extended into new platforms, including a feature on the council’s podcast

Borough Life Podcast⁠

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This episode has become the most viewed and widely shared to date, reflecting strong public interest and engagement.

Known Issues

The Experian data sits behind a paywall and is purchased on a licensing basis. The modelling is therefore inaccessible so is not freely scalable, other than via the Experian commercial offer.

Organisations looking to replicate the approach should consider the resource needed to action the data insight produced as part of the data flow. In Wigan, the success of the project has led to the council growing the income maximisation team, taking resource from elsewhere in the service and transforming service delivery to facilitate a more proactive approach.

Next Steps

The council is running a project to develop a single Wigan identifier with a focus on optimal data linkages.