London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham

The Homelessness Reduction Act came into effect on 3 April 2018. In order to prepare for its enactment and the required H-CLIC returns, many organisations including H&F went out and procured a homelessness case management system. H&F, along with many of our neighbouring boroughs, have found this software to be built with the back-office as the first priority as opposed to the homeless applicant and what they need in order to prevent their homelessness.

We would be interested in understanding how a system that is co-designed with homelessness clients (with built in automatic reminders, prompts, daily checks in, etc) can improve the customer experience of homelessness and prevent it in the first instance.

Homelessness is an issue across England and London. In the past six months, we’ve had 1,100 households approach us as looking for housing advice and potentially homeless. Of our homeless clients, we’ve only been able to prevent 70% of cases. As such, we would like to do further research into how technology can increase this figure and roll out to other similar councils.