Crisis Resilience Fund - Eligibility & Resilience Services

Description

The Crisis and Resilience Fund replaces the Household Support Fund and is intended to provide crisis support to households experiencing financial hardship, helping residents meet essential living costs and build longer‑term resilience. Local Authorities are required to deliver support quickly, transparently, and in a way that maintains accountability for public funds. The Fund is intended to cover a wide range of low-income households in need including pensioners, unpaid carers, care leavers, disabled people, families with children of all ages, and single-person households, and those struggling with one-off financial shocks or unforeseen events. In line with the grant criteria, the funding should be allocated across two strands: • Crisis Payments: A cash-equivalent approach to meet urgent needs (food, utilities, essential goods). This should be a multi-channel application-based process, allowing for individuals to self-refer. The fund should be available year-round, with flexible eligibility for low-income households and those facing a financial shock. Crisis payments should be person centred, trauma informed and needs based. • Resilience Services: Initiatives to build financial resilience for individuals and the community and includes services such as debt advice, income maximisation, savings advice and affordable credit. • Community Coordination: Investment in activities that connect and enhance the local support landscape - strengthening partnerships, referral pathways, and local welfare ecosystems. To deliver Crisis Payments and comply with the DWP guidance, there is a need for a robust digital payment solution that can deliver payments through multiple channels and support multiple delivery routes, including payments being made by trusted professional partners, internal teams and other commissioned providers. The payment system must reduce administrative burden, enable consistent controls across schemes, be accessible and provide accurate management information for local oversight and DWP reporting. The commissioning of a dedicated payment system will ensure the Council and trusted partners can deliver crisis payments at pace, scale provision to meet fluctuating demand, deliver payments in the most appropriate way for individuals and maintain strong governance and assurance throughout the life of the programme. The CRF Programme will run initially until 31 March 2029. HCC’s allocation for 26/27 is £11.3 million. Local authorities have the discretion to use the funding in various ways to support vulnerable households, including the distribution of crisis payments. Initial estimates indicate that up to 30% of HCC’s allocation will be used for this purpose.