Devonwide BVPI 213 Recording
The Local Housing Authorities in Devon have started to consistently record the types of homelessness prevention interventions that they carry out across the county. This monitoring started in April 2006. The first quarters results can be downloaded below.
Why?
The motivation for starting to monitor our homelessness prevention consistently came from the realisation that if we want to share meaningful information, and facilitate the development of best practice across our partner organisations, then we need to be collecting information in the same way to enable real comparisons.
It is exciting to see the trends in homelessness prevention and the quarterly reports will provide a basis for further discussion about they way in which we are each working. It is hoped that the reports will facilitate discussions and suggest new ways of working that may not otherwise have been considered. It is also hoped that this information could be used to help identify priorities for service development and future commissioning of services as it will help organisations to understand the types of housing need from a Devon wide perspective.
Limitations
We are at the beginning of this piece of work and already we have highlighted some issues with the data collection. For example there have been some discussions around the threshold that each Local Authority would consider as prevention, there have also been some discussion around the fact that it can be quite difficult to select one intervention as the one which prevented homelessness, as so often it is a combination of several different interventions, we are also working closely with local authorities to enable them to collect this information easily as some are not able to collect all of the fields effectively. These discussions can only help to increase the consistency of future reports but must be taken into consideration when looking through the infomation.
It should be noted that due to technical problems Torbay Council have been unable to participate in this monitoring, but is trying to resolve the situation internally.
