North Northamptonshire Council - Crisis and Resilience Fund

North Northamptonshire’s Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF) is administered by a small team led by Katie Carvell, Crisis and Resilience Fund Team Leader, working closely with Paul Williams, Stronger Communities (Partnership) Manager. 

Their area is an incredibly varied patch. Parts of the area are among the more deprived in the county; others are rural and harder to reach . The people who come to the council for help don’t fit one single profile, and the Crisis and Resilience Fund team has built its service around that reality. 

CRF - A move in the right direction

The Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF) took over from the Household Support Fund, and it works on a different principle. Where the previous fund was targeted largely at low-income households, CRF responds to circumstance rather than income bracket.

"CRF is completely different to the Household Support Fund, and I think it's a move in the right direction," Katie says. "It's not solely based on income criteria. If there's been a sudden crisis or financial shock, we can support with a crisis payment - and then feed into our resilience services to build that financial resilience."

That last point is the heart of it. CRF is not designed to absorb everyday cost-of-living pressure. It exists to support sudden shocks, and then - vitally - it treats the payment as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. Whether someone is employed, unemployed, or on any level of income, the team checks affordability at the point of crisis and decides on the best type of support from there.

How a case moves

Residents apply through the council's website and submit evidence of the crisis alongside bank statements, which allows the team to assess affordability. Every application is then triaged on urgency using a red, amber, green scale, and the team works to a target of support within 48 working hours from the point of holding all the correct evidence.

Getting help to people without the wait

Where a crisis payment is the right answer, it needs to arrive quickly and the mechanics of paying it have historically been the slowest part of the process at NNC. CRF’s cash first principle meant that they had to rethink how payments had worked in the past. The council's authority-wide finance system was never built for urgent, one-off payments to individuals.

"Before, you had to set the supplier up, then wait for it to be authorised, and if there were any issues it was very difficult to get resolved quickly," Katie explains.

The team had already spent several years distributing Household Support Fund payments through Huggg and now it is how CRF crisis payments are raised: Post Office cash-out vouchers where cash is right, and other vouchers or methods of support where cash may not be safe or appropriate for the individual.

"It's very easy to use,” Katie says. “I really like the platform, it's very straightforward. As soon as you click send, it's immediately sorted. It doesn't take long at all to raise a payment." 

Payment history matters too, in a fund built around repeat contact. When someone presents again, the team can see what they have already received and whether they engaged with the resilience offer. "You just search the email address and it's there," Katie says. 

North Northamptonshire is also exploring direct-to-bank payments through Huggg. The council's own finance system, used across the whole authority for BACS payments, means setting up each recipient and waiting for authorisation. Sending a payment link instead and letting the individual enter their own bank details can save much-needed time. On Huggg, bank payments are near-instant, landing in an individual's account within minutes, which matters when someone needs support quickly. 

Resilience first

The part of the service the team is proudest of is the part that does not end in a payment at all. Many applications describe ongoing cost-of-living difficulty rather than a sudden crisis, and for those residents the answer is a route into the council's resilience services: debt management, benefits support, income maximisation, rather than a one-off sum.

"The majority of people will go towards the resilience services and not necessarily receive the payment," Katie says.

It’s crucial that these routes are not signposting. The council's community coordination work, awarded to Support North Northamptonshire, gives the team somewhere to triage the more complex conversations, including cases needing adult social care involvement, with continuous engagement rather than a single appointment. Where a resident is fleeing domestic abuse for example, the team works with specialist partners such as the Sunflower Centre in Northampton, and links directly into housing services where someone has nowhere to live.

"We're bringing all the services in, rather than just signposting and sending people off to this, that and the other," Katie says. "We can pull the services to them."

Consistency as the service grows

Katie is now rolling training out across the wider team, so that raising a payment is not dependent on any one person being at their desk. She says it's very easy to train people on Huggg, because it is so user friendly: “I like the tiles, how straightforward it is. It's very easy to see your balance, very easy to see the voucher history." 

For a service measured on how fast it can reach someone in crisis, a quick, easy platform matters. One of North Northamptonshire Council's values is to be efficient, and on a fund where the difference between help and no help can be a matter of hours, efficiency isn't just good practice, it's the service itself. 

 Curious about how Huggg could work for your team? Get in touch