Dear Colleagues

The council has established a Cost of Living programme to co-ordinate resource across the council with our partners and the wider community, including the VCS, to more effectively support people in Lambeth who are struggling with the rising cost of living.

This briefing sets out activity currently underway within the programme for MPs/Members information.

The council’s website should be your first port of call for the latest information and support available in response to the cost-of-living crisis: https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/cost-living-crisis-support

Household Support Fund (HSF)

In October, the council announced a further £2.7m to support residents most impacted by the cost of living crisis. This funding is being distributed through:

• Support for low income households with children by providing £20 voucher per child in receipt of free school meals per week of the school holidays
• Targeted support payments to residents identified as in fuel poverty (see addressing fuel poverty below)
• Support to increase capacity/secure balanced provision at Lambeth’s at-scale food distribution sites and
• Supporting our network of warm spaces.

Detailed decision report available here.

This funding was allocated as part of the DWP Household Support Fund. Lambeth Council has received £5.4m additional funding through the DWP Household Support Fund over the last 12 months to support those most in need to help with significantly rising living costs.  This funding has been largely used to provide vouchers during the school holidays to families in receipt of free school meals, to provide targeted post office payouts to households with low incomes, to support the council’s Emergency Support Scheme (crisis payments) and to provide additional support to the Green Doctor scheme, at-scale foodbanks, and food hubs.

It has been confirmed that HSF funding will continue to be given every 6 months until 31 March 2024 although grant allocation and criteria has not yet been confirmed.

Addressing fuel poverty

Targeted payouts to the most vulnerable: From December, the council is issuing targeted payments to over 4500 residents identified as being in fuel poverty and not able to financially cope. This includes 196 pensioners, 631 households with children and 243 carers. These payments are up to £250 based on identified level of need using the council’s Low Income Family Tracker and whether the resident is a lone parent and/or carer. Eligible residents will receive a letter informing them they are eligible for this payment (a ‘Post Office Payout’) and they have 3 months to ‘cash’ their payment at the Post Office.

Targeted support to insulate homes:  From January, the council will be sending letters to over 1750 residents identified as being in fuel poverty and having low energy-efficiency ratings within their homes, causing increased costs. These letters will inform residents of energy saving packs that can be collected from local libraries and warm spaces. These packs include draught proofing tape and a letterbox draught excluder to prevent heat loss through doors and windows, energy efficient light bulbs, and panels that go behind radiators to keep the heat in.

Support to improve energy efficiency: The council commissions local Green Doctors to provide free, impartial advice to support residents to reduce their energy bills. This advice includes supporting residents with switching energy tariffs, reducing energy usage, accessing central government schemes to improve energy efficiency and applications for energy or water debt relief.

Residents can access this support by calling 0300 365 3005 or visiting Groundwork near me - Groundwork.

Warm spaces

The council is coordinating and supporting a network of warm spaces this Winter for residents unable to afford heating or reluctant to heat their homes due to increasing energy costs.

There are currently 37 open warm spaces in the borough and there has been interest in opening warm spaces by a further 19 organisations.

 A map of warm spaces including opening times and eligibility criteria is available on the council’s website: www.lambeth.gov.uk/warm-spaces

For further information please contact Laura Stoker lstoker@lambeth.gov.uk

Tackling food insecurity

For information on emergency food support and advice in the borough during the festive period please see the Lambeth Larder Festive Food and Support List 2022

Healthy Living Platform continues to provide its council-commissioned surplus food distribution service providing approx. 30 community organisations with surplus provisions from its new warehouse at 336 Brixton Road. 

In the last month the council also launched a new pilot project offering fruit and vegetables on prescription.  The project which aims to support vulnerable adults in the borough tackle ill health and food poverty. It will be run in partnership with the Alexandra Rose Charity and The Beacon Project, a community health-based organisation.

As part of its Household Support Fund allocation the council has provided an additional £70,000 to the Trussell Trust and Healthy Living Platform to enable them to meet high levels of demand and continue to provide nutritionally balanced support.

Supporting income maximisation

The council continues to add datasets to its Low Income Family Tracker enabling it to build a richer picture of the residents most impacted by the cost of living crisis.

Pension credit uptake: In mid-December targeted texts were sent to all pensioners identified as in fuel poverty and eligible for, but not claiming, pension credit to encourage uptake of this benefit.  Targeted calls to those in the cohort open to adult social care are being made by the Every Pound Counts team and our partners at AgeUK Lambeth are providing support to any pensioners requiring support, and not open to adult social care, to complete the application. 

Future campaigns are planned to encourage uptake of Free School Meals providing benefit to both schools and lower income households with children.

Skills and Employment

The council continues to work with the DWP and commissioned providers to provide a range of support to residents into employment and develop the skills they need to access work. Programmes include Connecting Communities, the Multiply programme, youth hubs, commissioning Centrepoint to support homeless young people and the Work and Health programme focussed on residents with disabilities or who are long-term unemployed, which is managed through Central London Forward. A Cost of Living Crisis Link Worker will be recruited to support residents accessing the Emergency Support Scheme to directly access skills and employment support. Lambeth Adult Learning’s Maths in Health week in December has also been engaging residents with cost-of-living themed issues and offering the opportunity to be referred to further skills development support.

Promoting Good Work and the London Living Wage is a key part of the work Skills and Employment does, aiming to reduce low pay and in-work poverty in the borough. In November, we held our annual tri-borough London Living Wage event with Lewisham and Southwark, and we have also formed a steering group to drive our plans to make Lambeth a London Living Wage place. Recent figures from the London Living Wage foundation showed a continuing increase in the number of London Living Wage accredited employers locally with 250 employers gaining accreditation.

Longer term, the current recommissioning of financial advice services will consider the longer terms needs of the residents and ensure we are able to fund services which meet residents needs and engage our most vulnerable communities.

The council is working closely with DWP to ensure residents are referred into the Council job brokerage services where appropriate, and the recently launched Connecting Communities programme has significantly improved our capacity to provide this. Skills and Employment commitments secured through key suppliers and stakeholders i.e., PwC, Shell will also be promoted through the “Lambeth’s Got Talent” campaign, identifying talent pathways for our young residents. We are putting funding in place to support some of our most vulnerable young people over winter in response to the cost-of-living crisis through the Youth Opportunity Fund. Support will include fuel vouchers, advice services and retail vouchers and will be distribute to the VCS, targeting young mothers, young carers and young people with SEN.

Engaging the VCS

On Monday 12 December, Lambeth Council’s Cost of Living programme team, in partnership with Integrate Agency and King’s College London’s Policy Institute, ran a webinar with voluntary and community sector organisations.  The purpose of the session was to further build upon the relationships and share information about: the cost-of-living impact on Lambeth; the data tools these groups can access to understand the situation as the crisis evolves further; the potential opportunity for council staff to offer volunteering time with their group/org; and to stimulate discussions for how the groups/orgs would like to work more collaboratively with each other to increase effectiveness moving forwards.

The Cost of Living programme team have also given presentations to Children’s and Young People’s VCS, Lambeth Welfare and Benefits Economic Forum, VCS Food Roundtable and Holiday Activity Fund Forum this month to share Winter plans and maintain the feedback loop between the council and its VCS partners.

Reaching diverse communities

It is recognised that residents from Black, Asian and Multi-Ethnic backgrounds are disproportionately impacted by increases to the cost of living. The council is currently working to reduce these inequalities in the following ways:

• Targeted pay outs to residents most in need - 52% of residents receiving targeted payments are from Black, Asian or Multi Ethnic background, 18% are from White backgrounds and 29% have not disclosed their ethnicity.
• Increasing collaboration with advice agencies - research has shown the majority of residents accessing Lambeth advice services in outreach settings are Black (67%) 
• Giving supermarket vouchers to residents through advice agencies - 75% of the supermarket vouchers distributed to residents have been given to Black women

Preventing housing instability and homelessness

Over the last 2 months, the council has carried out home visits to over 700 properties in significant arrears to provide support and options available to residents. Residents in arrears and on Universal Credit are proactively identified and Lambeth Council applies for direct payments to ensure that rent is paid, and arrears do not increase.

Lambeth Council’s Housing and Adult and Children’s Social Care teams are working to identify residents in arrears and known to social care to provide additional support to prevent housing instability and homelessness.

The Housing team have also employed a full-time Employment Advisor to assist residents in gaining employment and support them during the recruitment process in order to maximise their income.

Supporting businesses

A range of support is in place to support businesses as the cost of trading increases. A round table was held with the Lambeth BIDs to identify actions the council can take forward to support businesses. The BIDs identified the GLA funded Wayfinder programme which supports business and start up and resilience as key to our response. We have committed to strengthening our programme communications and lobbying to the GLA to ensure the service is best located and focused to meet the current pressures. A business survey has been published and circulated through the business newsletter mailing list (circa 10,000) alongside the information published in the recent edition of “Lambeth Talk.” We have submitted a £200k GLA grant bid in partnership with Brixton based ‘Raw Material’, to invest in practical and achievable measures that will improve energy efficiency in our creative workspaces. Our proposed plans for expenditure on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which were submitted to the GLA on the 13th of December, embedded responding to the cost of living crisis as a theme throughout and targeted this outcome area in the Communities and Place theme selected by the GLA in their investment plan.

Activity has also begun on our SC1 life sciences programme, which will support the growth of a high paying and secure sector for the future, benefitting residents by supporting growth which will offer many local opportunities for good work in the long-term. Research has been commissioned into employment pathways into the life sciences sector, and the Royal Street development has been approved by planning committee.

The Council website is being updated with the latest business support information, which is additionally available on the business facing “Lambeth Now” website. This includes an Economic Resilience Fund of £2.5m supporting 13 different business support programmes, a programme of business-rate relief, and the provision of affordable workspace for new or existing businesses who might otherwise struggle to pay market rents. The Future Office space funding stream, supporting businesses to access office space in the borough, has also just been launched for the third round of funding.  The Council has also lobbied central government on the challenges facing local businesses and the need for further support and certainty.

Support for Council staff

There are currently a range of benefits offered to staff which can help them financially as well as support their health and wellbeing.  These include an Employee Assistance Programme (which offers a number of different types of advice services including financial resilience), season ticket loans, a salary sacrifice cycle scheme, pension surgeries, an online staff wellness hub, and crisis support counselling.

A consultation undertaken with staff has confirmed the crisis is a significant personal concern to them with many staff worried about paying for essentials. As a result, the council has proposed an additional honorarium payment to the lowest paid Lambeth Council employees (those with a basic salary of £30,852 or less), including agency workers, to recognise the disproportionate impact the cost of living crisis is having on lower paid workers.

These payments would be in addition to the latest pay award and in conjunction with a range of other new actions with no associated cost such as creating a one-stop staff support page, updating the health & wellbeing hub with low-cost healthy eating, and budgeting advice/videos, providing in-house debt advice with voluntary sector organisations, and better promoting leisure/retail discounts for staff.   

Communications

The council’s website should be your first port of call for the latest information and support available in response to the cost-of-living crisis: www.lambeth.gov.uk/cost-living-crisis-support

In response to a request from staff and partners an information pack for support staff has been created. Councillors and MPs are encouraged to use this document to signpost residents to services they can use to help them with increases to the cost of living. The pack covers: finding the right support, food, and fuel support available in Lambeth, recommended advice services, where to apply for grants and relevant contact details.  The pack is attached alongside this briefing and an updated version will be made available over the coming months and via the council’s website.

A general Cost of Living leaflet (also attached) including translated versions (11 languages total) and an energy savings leaflet have also been prepared for wide distribution across our council, NHS and VCS access points. 

This winter’s Lambeth Talk edition was primarily Cost of Living focused. It features an interview with Cllr Amos and articles highlighting our immediate support offer, VCS partners, energy saving tips and our commissioned service Green Doctors, support for business, food support and our Connecting Communities offer.    

Please contact Lara Ianelli: liannelli@lambeth.gov.uk if you would like copies of the leaflet and/or translated versions.

With best wishes,

Cllr David Amos

Cabinet Member for Finance and Cost of Living

Tom Barrett

Programme Director: Cost of Living