Data and Innovation in Public Sector
Following a 58% increase in homelessness in just five years, Maidstone Borough Council (MBC) recognised that it needed to shift its focus from responding to the immediate crisis to building capacity for early intervention and prevention.
Setting homelessness prevention as its top strategic priority in 2019, MBC embarked on a pioneering journey to drive early intervention and prevention through improved use of data and analytics, setting out three key objectives against which to measure progress:
Reduce demand on temporary accommodation by improving early identification of cases.
Reduce the amount of time workers spend gathering information from multiple systems, enabling them to spend more time working directly with individuals
Improve partner working and gain a more holistic view of individuals through improved access to third-party data
The Council approached EY and Xantura (our data and analytics partner) to support its transformation towards a preventative service model. Collectively, we pioneered a new approach to tackling homelessness by designing and implementing an innovative data and analytics tool called OneView, which brings together data from different organisations to identify those at risk of future homelessness.
OneView has helped MBC achieve its objectives by providing access to core functionalities that support homelessness prevention, including a single view of the customer, automated case summaries, safeguarding alerts and interactive reporting. OneView’s predictive analytics and natural-language generation (NLG) capabilities have been key in achieving MBC’s strategic priority of early intervention, and the results speak for themselves:
- Prevented around 100 households from becoming homeless,– despite the heightened risk brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic
- Reduced the risk of homelessness by 40% through early intervention
- Reduced the time spent on administrative tasks by 61 days, enabling frontline officers to spend more time working directly with at risk individuals
This has generated a return on investment of over 190%, which has potential to increase to over 600% with a broader roll-out of the safeguarding alerts.
View the EY profile in the MCA Members Directory.