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Homelessness Statistics User Engagement
Andrew Presland, Joss Bass, Jeremy Hicks
Statutory homelessness framework
• Housing Act 1977, Housing Act 1996, and the Homelessness Act 2002
• Applicants who apply for assistance who are eligible, unintentionally homeless and in priority need are owed a ‘main homelessness duty’
User Engagement
• Consider the P1E from two perspectives– Data providers (local authorities)– Data users
How can we improve our statistics without increasing local authorities’
workload?
• ‘Goldilocks’ problem
How can we improve our statistics without increasing local authorities’
workload?
• We hope to answer this question by– Generating ideas– Constructive, honest critique– Audience participation– Feedback sheet
Summary of session
1. Data user presentation – Homeless Link, Rachel Coffey Research Manager
2. Data provider presentation– Charnwood Borough Council, David Scruton
3. Group discussion & feedback – You!
What’s behind the numbers?
DCLG stats user engagement day
Rachel Coffey
Research Manager
Who are Homeless Link?
• National membership charity
• Over 500 members
• Work to make services better
• Campaign for policy change
• Homelessness Transition Fund
How many people are homeless?
Rough sleeping counts
SP data
Own research
Acceptances up by 1/3
Why are people homeless?
Tenancy problems
Where are homeless people going?
The number of households in TA in another local authority has doubled in three years
Affordability of renting
Share of affordable properties in London under the Shared Accommodation Rate
Policy and research
• Welfare reform – sanctions, LWA
• Health of homeless people – dual
needs
• Improving evidence-base for the
sector
DCLG User Engagement Day
Homelessness Session
David Scruton, Charnwood Borough Council
What I’ve been asked to cover
• How easy is P1E to complete (obtaining and submitting figures)?– And how many people are involved each quarter– How much data is directly from systems and what
needs processing• How easy would system changes be?• Do we already hold additional useful information?• Are the statutory homeless publications useful to
LAs?• How might we improve the P1E?• (and a couple of words of caution of my own)
My experience of the P1E
How easy is the P1E to complete?
• Down to the quality and completeness of the data
• A lot of the information is routine, but…
Collecting data• Ongoing cases give an opportunity to fill
the gaps
• But some clients you’ll only interview once, for a relatively short period of time in sometimes quite charged conditions
Data Issues• Significant difference between
period data and snapshot
• Easy to refine and rerun the period data
• Numbers in temp is snapshot of where people slept that night
Snapshot Data• Often information isn’t updated until at
least following day
• Particular issue if quarter ends over weekend or holiday as may have been out of hours placements
• Difficult to rerun the snapshot as other cases will also have been updated
• Inevitable there will be some manual processing
• and the P1E form is very unforgiving
Data ValidationYou appear to be losing the will to live, are you completing the P1E?
Other issues
• Navigation is clunky making it difficult to work through errors- both within screens and between
• Problems printing• Guidance not particularly user friends and
entirely text based• People don’t understand the nuances- eg
hierarchy of priority need reasons• Mapping to the P1E categories – eg Couples• Not supporting recent browsers
Who’s involved
Prevention and Relief
• Involves a range of partners
• Takes time to collate at the end of the quarter
• Balance between data protection and double counting
• Advice and information vs assistance or intervention– Provided on a casework basis
Changing the system• Depends on what, when and how• Depends on local set up• Need enough notice – IT and paper forms• Lots of different IT systems and suppliers
so likely to be cost and time delay• Need to ensure changes are
communicated to the right people• Who can suggest changes?• Where does it sit with the single data list
commitment?
Do we hold related information that could be provided if requested?
• Inevitably
• But not necessarily the same information in the same format as other authorities
• Challenge will be developing a standard dataset everyone can easily provide
How useful are the published statistics?
• Useful to a degree but quite limited global information published
• There’s a huge dataset going back 13 years but no obvious way of mining it
• LAs have some ability to interrogate the historic data but it’s time consuming and difficult
Some caution around the data
• Are you comparing like with like (ie non-priority cases)?
• Are noticeable local changes real or changes to reporting methods?
• Can you cross validate? ie P1E against CORE against LAHS
Suggestions for improvement
• Improve navigation
• Proper user friendly guidance notes
• Plain English error reporting
• Clear alert to the right people when system needs to change
• Improved printing options
• A reporting tool
Group discussion
1. How can we improve our statistics in a way that does not increase the burden on local authorities?
2. Is there anything else about the P1E homelessness statistics that you want to feedback to us?
