TL;DR

East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s cabinet has approved £60,000 for an AI tool to help residents in financial crisis reach the right support faster. It sits inside a refreshed strategy for the council’s £3.8m Crisis and Resilience Fund allocation for 2026/27. The council is also spending £89,457 on devices and connectivity for households that cannot get online.

What the money buys

The tool is meant to deliver what the council calls a “no wrong door” approach. In practice, the first service a resident approaches should steer them to the help they need, whether or not it delivers that help itself. Council officers hope the system will also expose gaps in provision and cut duplication between services. The Scarborough News report does not name a supplier or describe how the AI works.

The device funding targets low-income and vulnerable households. It can pay for a device, a connection or help using one, where being offline stops someone claiming benefits, seeking support or looking for work.

How the fund is split

Just over half the budget goes on crisis payments, free school meals among them. Resilience services take 31.7%, housing payments 8.6%, administration 5.6% and community coordination 2.4%. A similar sum is expected for each of the following two years.

The council has named three areas in greatest need: Goole; coastal Hornsea with the East Yorkshire Wolds; and Holderness, both north and rural. To identify households, the council is turning to an analytics product, the Low Income Family Tracker, which around 100 local authorities already run. Self-referral, foodbanks, family hubs, community venues and GP surgeries remain routes in.

Council leader Anne Handley said the aim was “giving people a hand-up, not hand-outs”.

Why it matters beyond Yorkshire

This is small money, and it puts AI to work on triage and signposting rather than decision-making. That is lower risk than using AI to decide entitlement. It still raises the issues this site has tracked. In August we reported research finding councils adopting AI faster than they can govern it. This week Citizens Advice called for a guaranteed right to reach a human when chatbots fall short.

Looking forward

The test is whether the tool routes people to help or adds another layer between residents and staff. People in crisis are often the least able to work around a system that misreads them. The council should publish what the tool does, who supplies it and how it is evaluated. Other councils weighing similar tools will want that evidence before spending their own Crisis and Resilience Fund money.