Disconnected household records

The societal problem

Homelessness can have a particularly detrimental effect on children. In A National Plan to End Homelessness, the government says practitioners and services working with families and children must receive and share relevant information about the children and families they support, including to assess safeguarding risks effectively.

In a government evaluation, interviewees thought they could provide more effective support and save much subsequent time and resource by intervening with residents before a crisis point was reached.

Another evaluation found that budgets allocated for prevention, notably the Homelessness Prevention Grant, were increasingly being spent on crisis relief. Data collected from the five participating local areas showed that less than 1% of Rough Sleeping Initiative funding was spent on prevention. Improved infrastructure for joint working at local level was seen as vital for housing, health and care in particular.

The duty to refer

Since 1 October 2018, specified public authorities have had a duty to refer service users who they think may be homeless or threatened with homelessness to local authority homelessness or housing options teams.

Under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, the specified public authority must ask the person to agree to it notifying a local housing authority, and must notify the authority the person identifies if they agree.

Local authorities may deliver their prevention duty through any activities aimed at preventing a household threatened with homelessness within 56 days from becoming homeless.

In a government evaluation, interviewees noted collaborative working complications as a particular issue within the Duty to Refer process.

Records

• Many services rely on systems that cannot easily exchange data with each other.
• The case management systems used by local councils are often different from those used by their supporting organisations, such as charity delivery partners.
• Accurate data is not shared across council service areas, which has resulted in a disconnected council view of residents and families.
• Agreements to share data can take months or even years to negotiate, partly so bodies can ensure the correct data security and protection protocols are in place.
• Inefficient handovers between service stages mean residents can get missed in the process.
• Stakeholders felt that without data sharing, it would be difficult to locate the correct people to target services at.

“We have a disjointed view of our citizens, especially the most vulnerable.”

Both internal and external sharing are significantly hindered by the lack of consistent identifiers such as NHS numbers or UPRNs.

Among 10 departments and agencies, the National Audit Office found more than 20 different ways of identifying individuals and businesses. In discussions with the National Audit Office, departments suggested that between 60% and 80% of time is spent cleaning and merging data.

What government is doing

There have been many strategies and initiatives over the past 20 years to promote joining up and using data more efficiently across different services.

Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 provides gateways that allow specified public authorities to share data with each other.

The Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) programme is led by the Ministry of Justice in partnership with MHCLG, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Welsh Government and Public Health Wales. BOLD initially focused on four pilot areas: reducing homelessness, substance misuse, re-offending and supporting victims of crime.