“DataKind UK’s recommendations… will help us align our services to the constant changes within the economy and Lewisham’s landscape in the coming years.”

CAL staff member

Citizens Advice Lewisham (CAL) provides advice and information on a wide range of issues such as welfare benefits, debt, housing, and employment to anyone that lives, works, or studies in the London Borough of Lewisham.

CAL believes that everyone in their diverse borough should have the knowledge and confidence to deal with the issues they might face by being empowered to help themselves, and where this isn’t possible, be provided with direct assistance. Their ambition was to provide an accessible and multi-channel range of services for up to 30,000 clients per annum by December 2021.

Budget cuts have since stopped them following all of these proposed outcomes, but CAL are still using the findings today, and in future, hope to revisit their data at that deep a level in-house. Currently, demand is changing across the whole Citizens Advice Network: more people are approaching them with more issues and complex problems than ever before; debt and debt related to housing, utilities, and Council Tax are rising; and the service expects a big rise in benefits support requests in the final transition to Universal Credit.

What did they find out?

CAL is meeting its mission of reaching the most vulnerable areas in the borough, with a few exceptions where they could plan to target more services in the future.
The amount and distribution of services for the community changed after the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 – overall cases decreased, but the proportion of housing advice cases rose in the lead-up to the DataDive project.
Most service users only reached out to CAL once for help, but some needed more. To help plan their service provision in the future, they were able to identify repeat users who were asking for help 10 times or more.

What are CAL’s data challenges?

Lewisham is a diverse borough, with both relatively affluent and deprived areas. CAL wanted to understand which geographical areas had high need and limited access to resources – areas they called ‘vulnerability hotspots’ – so they can ensure that the most vulnerable people are actively targeted by their services, and aren’t facing barriers to access. A major goal of the project was to discover the best locations for community drop-in hubs across Lewisham. Finally, they wanted to understand how demand for their services had changed since the start of lockdown, so they could ensure their offerings were up to date, and meeting the needs of people across the borough.

CAL staff believed that existing, local drop-in hubs mainly attracted people in the immediate vicinity, meaning that areas without local hubs would be poorly served. They also worried that they were not supporting especially vulnerable users, who might find it difficult to use the phone or online advice services due to a lack of digital skills and access.

The Project

Despite being entirely remote, the volunteers, Data Ambassadors, and charity representatives brought the usual huge levels of enthusiasm, community spirit, and data skills to the work.

CAL’s goals for the project were:

Identify ‘vulnerability hotspots’ in the borough.
Identify where to place community hubs throughout the borough, or other means of reducing service access barriers.

The Findings

Goal 1: Identify vulnerability hotspots in the borough.

The DataDive project found that CAL is in fact mostly meeting its mission of matching service provision to demand by putting the most vulnerable service users across the borough first.

Maps comparing CAL’s service users throughout Lewisham with the concentration of the most vulnerable people in the borough. This shows CAL is doing a good job matching its overall services with where its most vulnerable users are

For this project, CAL used their own specific definition of vulnerability, which assesses their service users’ ability to cope with changes in their circumstances, like losing employment. The framework includes factors like low income, housing, mental health, and disability: the more indicators on this list a person has, the more likely they are to need intensive support.

To try and locate people in Lewisham who are similarly vulnerable, but are not CAL service users, the team used data from the Index of Multiple Deprivation – a government metric that captures seven different areas of deprivation including levels of income, employment, and crime. To find comparable patterns in the borough, volunteers mapped this data to Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA). LSOA are little units of about 1,500 people each, designed to improve reporting on small area statistics in England and Wales.

The resulting map of Multiple Deprivation, above left, shows the red LSOA as the least deprived, through to yellow LSOA, which are the most deprived. For example, to the south of the borough were some of the areas with higher levels of deprivation.

CAL could then compare that to where their clients were coming from, looking at total cases coming into their services, per capita, so that the outcome was by population in each area. In the right hand map, the colours correspond to the volume of cases, so the yellow areas were where CAL was seeing the most people, and the red areas were getting the least. Happily, the maps line up quite well. The areas where they’re getting a high proportion of their clients are also where the population with the highest deprivation scores tends to be.

Bottom line: CAL is doing a good job of reaching the most vulnerable areas. The DataDive project further identified two LSOAs that would benefit from an increased service presence.

Goal 2: Identify where to place community hubs throughout the borough, or other means of reducing service access barriers.

Mapping CAL’s most frequent service users throughout Lewisham to understand where to put in-person services.

While CAL was doing very well overall matching service provision to demand, to help with this even further, DataDive weekend volunteers also mapped where the neediest service users were (termed ‘chronic users’) – the very small proportion of clients who had 10 or more cases with CAL. In this map, purple LSOAs have one chronic user, teal areas have two chronic users, and yellow areas have three chronic users. This additional information could help them to intervene earlier on where cases are complex and intensive support might be needed.

Once the volunteers had shown that across Lewisham, services were broadly well-matched to use, another group focused on how the demand for services had changed, to help CAL adjust what types of support they provide based on the borough’s changing requests.

Chart of the changes in service demands pre-and post-lockdown in 2020, showing lower service requests overall but a growing proportion of cases about housing.

2020 was an unusual year for many charities and CAL was no exception. Lockdown immediately reduced numbers of use for their services as their physical hubs and offices closed. This chart is a rolling four-week average, so the full extent of the drop-off appears delayed until one month after lockdown began. Most notably, although overall there was less demand, housing cases (orange line) were proportionally on the rise. The chart also shows a spike in benefits and debt (dark blue and grey) immediately after the lockdown. Seeing these changing trends and understanding how many support requests there are in relation to one another is a huge help when planning future service provision. Assessing these needs has led them to do more work around employment, housing, and languages.

What’s next?

Following the DataDive project, CAL presented their findings to the Mayor of Lewisham. At a time when many local councils are looking for ways to cut spending, CAL were able to protect their funding by demonstrating the value their services are providing to local residents. They also used the findings to support those who were most vulnerable, and were unable to get online or access face-to-face support, under lockdown restrictions.

The team wants to do more work to reach solid conclusions, such as refining their maps to really pinpoint where outreach services need to be placed.They have gained clarity about how they track vulnerability, and where their data collection can be improved for this purpose. They also acknowledge that there might be some internal cynicism about this data reflecting what staff already knew from experience – but that this is a natural part of the journey to becoming data-driven.

Their increased confidence with data-driven decision making also led them to establish a series of Community Labs with other advice and support organisations across the borough, in order to work together more effectively to protect Lewisham’s most vulnerable residents.

The CAL team said: “[DataKind UK’s] recommendations on how we can enhance data management in the future, which include data training sessions for staff, assigning a Data Officer, and acquiring a data management and visualisation tool, will help us align our services to the constant changes within the economy and Lewisham’s landscape in the coming years.”

A huge thank you is due to all our volunteers and charity representatives for uncovering new insights into how to serve Lewisham’s vulnerable residents: Data Ambassadors for the project were Anna Steinitz, William Tong, Shreya Agarwal, Natan Mish, and Antonio Campello. Representing CAL were Rebecca Porter, Christian Rauch, Maria Kogkou, James Mitchell, and Simon Boulton.

Read more about CAL’s work with DataKind and subsequent impact on their blog.

Finding the most vulnerable with Citizens Advice Lewisham