Supporting Homeless Services: Case Study
Supporting Homeless Services
CASE STUDY
Using data to provide a real time picture of housing demand in the city
Council teams across Health and Social Care, Neighbourhoods & Regeneration and Strategic, Information, Innovation and Technology (SIIT) services are working together to look at the increasing pressures and demands for housing across the city and how this can be best managed.
As part of this work, there is a requirement to make better use of our data to help alleviate housing pressures by providing a real time picture of housing demand and supply in the city.
For example, teams from across the council family have worked in partnership to better understand the pressing demands for housing. This includes supporting those who have presented as homeless, and includes displaced Ukrainians, former asylum seekers and native residents. This demand is assessed alongside anticipated supply to better manage housing pressures.
One example of this is to track in real time the number and details of housing lets turned over by social landlords to homelessness services each month. This enables service managers to work with social landlords in a more agile way to influence the supply of properties for homelessness applicants across the city. This approach is based on understanding stakeholder needs, managing the data in a more agile way and integrating with technology to produce live dashboards that provide insights that can be used to change service delivery.
A second example uses data to better inform housing strategy in the city – that is how to plan house building and supply across Glasgow to support the development of sustainable, successful neighbourhoods. After understanding the needs of the Housing Strategy team, a series of data dashboards have been created and brought together in one interface to provide real time data on critical measures such as house building supply, existing stock, empty homes, private rents and housing repairs.
One example of this is to track in real time the number and details of housing lets turned over by social landlords to homelessness services each month. This enables service managers to work with social landlords in a more agile way to influence the supply of properties for homelessness applicants across the city. This approach is based on understanding stakeholder needs, managing the data in a more agile way and integrating with technology to produce live dashboards that provide insights that can be used to change service delivery.
A second example uses data to better inform housing strategy in the city – that is how to plan house building and supply across Glasgow to support the development of sustainable, successful neighbourhoods. After understanding the needs of the Housing Strategy team, a series of data dashboards have been created and brought together in one interface to provide real time data on critical measures such as house building supply, existing stock, empty homes, private rents and housing repairs.
These solutions have been created by developers in the SIIT Data Team, primarily using ArcGIS and Microsoft Power BI applications, both of which are powerful tools used by the Council to visually bring data to life.
Kevin Howe, Homelessness Services Manager in Glasgow HSCP, said: “The social landlord data dashboard has been instrumental in allowing Homelessness Services to visualise and monitor our strategic aim of securing 60% of social housing lets for homeless households. In addition to this, it has also allowed us to compare social housing turnover year-on-year and better understand trends within the social housing sector”.
