How to improve Homelessness Services - quickly
The story of Southwark using the Impact Sprint method

Many Council homelessness services across the country are facing huge waiting lists, delays and are overwhelmed. Often, people know change is needed but don’t know where to start or aren’t able to make space to improve in the face of constant turmoil.

Here, we will share our approach with multiple local authorities to make significant and lasting improvements to their homelessness services - and to do it fast. We've worked with over 6 LAs on homelessness.

The approach of a real 'case example' from London Borough of Southwark, described here, applies to other localities and can be modified to meet the requirements of different local authorities' challenges.

At the time of introducing the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 (HRA), Southwark pioneered homelessness prevention. But even they have experienced challenges.

Post-COVID restrictions, as they returned to in-person service, like many other local authorities, made progress difficult. Long wait times on phone lines meant tensions ran high.

Wait times for a part 7 assessment (determining if the Council can accept a legal duty to house a resident) were approximately a month. The backlog meant that some residents were being placed in temporary or emergency accommodation before having an assessment. In this position, challenges of this scale feel like they might take years to resolve. 

However, Southwark used an Impact Sprint approach. They brought together a team of frontline staff across the service to test solutions over a two-week sprint. A month after the sprint, the wait times for a part 7 had reduced from a month to less than a day.

So - how was this possible?

An Impact Sprint is a specific method of prototyping improvements. It is an intense 5-step process. It involves locking up a team of folks from the frontline of the service for two weeks with no distractions to collaborate, identify, test and implement solutions to the service’s challenges.

Although this process is useful, the specific method is less important. 

There are many different ways to do this (come together for a workshop once a week, 2 days on, 2 days off, etc). The overall approach is far more important - aiming to make changes quickly and sustainably.

Below, we will explain the principles behind this approach and tell the story of how many councils made progress on the challenges they faced so quickly.

Week 0 - Getting started 

The team started by trying to understand and define Southwark's challenges. The team did some value stream, system and process mapping, expert interviews with staff and observed calls and appointments with residents. 

The challenges were framed as potential opportunities for improvement using our model, “7 ways to save and improve”.

You can read more about some of the different improvements here.

Over 60 different improvements were identified, both big and small. 

Recognising that the service can’t solve everything at once, the potential improvements were 'ordered'.  Many of the ideas the team identified have now formed part of the service’s 'backlog' of further improvement, with the most promising proposed to work on during the sprint. 

We asked Southwark's Head of Service to select just a few opportunities that felt both achievable and would have the most impact on the service and residents. She selected just three: 

Week 1 – Exploring the challenge, creating ideas and initial testing

The first week of the sprint was spent working with the team to explore the challenges they’re facing, creating ideas and, towards the end of the week, putting some of these ideas into practice in a small, safe-to-fail way. 

Here’s a rough idea of how the first week in Southwark went.

The team worked through the three ideas above and self-organised into three teams to develop and test practical solutions they could use to achieve this. At the end of each day, we held an open show and tell of our progress. Everyone and anyone across the entire service was welcome to attend. 

A big part of the first week was practically experiencing the system as it worked – and using this to spot and test ideas. One afternoon, the team listened to six calls made to the general enquiries phone line. 

They discovered that only one of the six was from a new contact. The other five were already in the system chasing their application because they hadn’t heard anything. 

The team began to understand that the lack of accessibility of case workers and feedback on what was happening with residents’ applications was clogging up the system with repeat contacts - making it MUCH harder for people contacting the service for the first time to get through and get support.

"That was a real AHA-moment."

Once the team had experienced the system, they started to put some of their ideas into practice. One of the things the team wanted to test was pulling in a placement officer once a case worker had interviewed a resident to see if there were any private rented sector properties the resident could access. If this worked, then the resident’s homelessness could be prevented immediately. 

Some officers were sceptical about this idea. It would require a placement officer to be physically present in the building and discuss the matter face-to-face with the case worker and the resident - a big change from normal. Would placement officers need to attend every single assessment? This wasn't part of their job at the time. 

However, we just wanted to test out an idea in a small way. If it didn’t make a difference, then we would reject it. One of the placement teams agreed to come test it out.

Following the assessment, the case worker and placement officer talked with the resident, then went out into the corridor and had a collaborative conversation to try and figure out how they could best help the resident.

While they weren’t able to find him a placement the same day, they set him up with viewings for flats the next day and the placement team were able to provide funding support to help him secure one of these. They were also able to give him key bits of advice, such as, by increasing his hours of work very slightly, he would greatly increase his ability to access private rented sector accommodation, as he would become eligible for further benefits support from central government. 

We shared this during the 'show and tell' at the end of the day. Everyone agreed that by collaborating in person they got a much better understanding of the resident’s needs, provided better support and, crucially, it all happened faster.

The team also began experimenting with improving the forms that triage officers and case workers had to complete. The team shared some paper prototypes at our daily 'show and tell' and got vital feedback.

Colleagues outside the team shared that it was crucial that the forms still captured certain data requirements - if they didn’t, this could affect the service’s funding. 

Week 2 – Testing, iterating and planning for scale

In week two the team focused on testing the changes they’d identified. In practice this meant really doing the work; taking cases, capturing the impact that the changes were having, proposing further improvements, then doing it all over again the next day.

The team identified and made many improvements across the week. They focussed particularly on the process when someone contacts the service, aiming to prevent demand as early as possible.

One idea they tested was removing the need for triage officers to get sign-off from the senior duty officer when they booked an appointment with a case worker. 

The team tested many improvements across the second week, but here’s one example illustrating the value of testing things in practice.

Completely by accident, because of the small amount of space available for the team to use during the sprint, the team sat all around one table prototyping the changes. 

Some were taking first-contact triage calls, and some were writing paperwork for cases, some were taking virtual assessments, others were organising placements for residents. Every so often, the team would chat and ask each other questions about what they were doing, seeing if anyone had any advice. 

As the day went on, the team realised this felt different. Because they had people with many different roles around the table in close proximity, they could solve problems and make decisions much quicker and give better support to residents. They had discovered how beneficial working in a small multi-disciplinary team can be.

In just two short weeks, by collaborating and testing out improvements in Southwark:

• More people were able to do prevention and it became part of everyone’s role. 

• Duty teams with different specialisations now sit physically together to collaborate for advice.

• Clients are seen in person. This helps to get a better understanding of their complex situation and determines the most appropriate interventions.

• Clear “relief” and “prevent” pathways were created with duty rota for people doing this work. 

• Clients’ initial approach-to-assessment was three weeks and four days. It is now 12 hours and 22 minutes. 

• Staff effort per approach took three hours and 33 minutes. It’s now just two hours and 50 minutes. 

• A month after the sprint, the number of days until the next available assessment slot had gone from nearly a month to 0.

What does this mean? In short, more residents being helped and more positive outcomes. 

However, this isn't the end.