Case studies

The London Borough of Croydon designed a behavioural solution to help encourage the uptake of alternative pathways to finding accommodation.

Dacorum Borough Council moved its Council Tax registration process from paper-based to online, and in the process used behavioural insights to redesign the layout and wording of the applications.

Newcastle City Council wanted to understand why certain families turn down the offer of early help, and to identify opportunities to increase the take-up of support.

Wigan Council's Collections team used behavioural insights to encourage tenants who were in arrears and who had not been in contact with the Collections team to get in touch and access support. The team sent a one-page letter to tenants – written with an empathetic tone emphasising support rather than arrears and rent collection, and featuring a single call-to-action. Laura Melling of Wigan Council reflects on the project.

Screening has a significant role to play in delivering earlier diagnosis of most common cancers. We applied to be part of the LGA Behavioural Insights programme to work alongside national experts and develop an innovation to increase cancer-screening rates in targeted communities.

A mixed method approach was adopted and a pragmatic behavioural insights framework was employed to inform the redesign of the service offer with the aim of making treatment uptake easy, attractive, timely and social (EAST). We explored factors affecting treatment uptake through a behavioural insights survey (Phase 1) collected between September 2018 and January 2019, and qualitative interviews (Phase 2) with HART service users conducted between October 2018 and May 2019. Recommendations were implemented between September and December 2019. We used routinely collected data to compare service uptake rates pre and post service redesign.

Children and young people's mental health has been deteriorating increasingly fast since the COVID pandemic and has become a key area of concern for local authorities.

Greater Manchester Combined Authority worked with the Behavioural Insights Team to improve the client consent process for its Working Well employment support programme.

The behavioural intervention increased the use of BFF by 3 percentage points, and increased breastfeeding rates at the new birth visit by 4 percentage points, at the  six to eight week visit by 6 percentage points and by 3 percentage points at the  three to four month visit. However, these differences were not statistically significant.   

Essex County Council processed the vast majority of Blue Badge renewals in paper, causing significant additional cost compared to online renewals. By using behavioural insights and making small changes to the renewal letter, the number of paper renewals was reduced by almost one-fifth.