Newham Council has been selected to receive £100,000 from Round 6 of the DLUHC Local Digital Fund to undertake a Discovery project to tackle homelessness.
The project will explore contributors to homelessness and how tailored, user-friendly advice and support can improve upstream prevention of homelessness. The project will also inspect data factors that can better identify people at risk of homelessness.
The submission was made in partnership with Redbridge Council, the Royal Borough of Kingston, Croydon Council and Rushmoor District Council.
This is one of 16 council-led projects carefully selected from 50 applications representing 118 councils between 13 October and 24 November 2022. The aim of the Local Digital Fund is to make local government services safer, resilient, and cost effective. The projects will help to create the next generation of local public services, where technology is an enabler rather than a barrier to service improvements, and services are user-centred.
The aim of the project is to understand user needs around the provision of housing advice in order to prevent homelessness and to explore the viability of established a common solution that can be adopted by other Councils. The project will:
- Identify the contributors that lead to homelessness that can be identified before becoming a crisis
- Identify the benefits of an online triage function that serves all tenures and advice needs that relate to issues that could result in homelessness
- Assess the need for an ‘open-to-all’ solution that residents, voluntary agencies, local authority staff can all use to triage/refer users to the most appropriate service to provide support and advice
- Establish needs to enable the user to request advice under a single request for employment, financial and skills advice
- Establish what data needs to be captured from the request to enable a case management approach
- Produce standardised content that is accessible to all service users that can be reused and tailored by local authorities
