Innovation Case Study: Hull City Council
Telescope’s work is based on a strong belief that empathy can power meaningful change, and that sharing insights and evidence from the frontline is vital to improve outcomes in the public sector. Our learning programmes bridge the gap between those delivering services, and those designing them.
The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) champions the creation and use of better evidence for a world without homelessness and is a member of the What Works Network. It seeks to improve the lives of those experiencing homelessness by ensuring policy, practice and funding decisions are underpinned by reliable evidence. Echoing some of the principles of Telescope’s work, CHI ran an “Evidence Accelerator” in 2021 offering an innovative learning journey to local authorities.
Telescope supported the CHI team to assess the impact of this Accelerator on local authorities by mapping their user journey. We carried out workshops and interviews with Aberdeen and Hull City Councils, and saw significant overlap between the experiences of these participants within local councils.
The experience of Louise Gilpin’s team at Hull on the Accelerator provides an excellent case study of the value of innovation within local councils, including how taking a step back and looking holistically at how services are delivered can fundamentally change outcomes for the better.
Across many parts of the UK, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an increasing demand on housing and homelessness services provided by local authorities. Trying their best to manage limited housing stock and large caseloads, Hull City Council (HCC) is not alone among local authorities in struggling to tackle the “revolving door” problem, by which people present as homeless who have already been through council homelessness services on previous occasions. Many young people in particular are trapped in this cycle of temporary and transitional housing.
Hull City Council were aware of this problem, but with limited resources, and temporary accommodation being suitable for most of the individuals they work with, they found it difficult to define a scope for the project. Also, as with many public services, they found themselves unable to take the time to focus on really understanding this phenomenon, and carrying out the work needed to prevent it from occurring. “Theoretically, although this revolving door issue is a massive one we want to tackle… we don’t have a really strict timeline for it,” explains Louise Gilpin, Project Officer in Neighbourhoods and Housing in Hull City Councill. In resource-constrained local authority settings, teams too often find themselves dealing with more immediate priorities, for example when given a mandate to vaccinate all of their homeless population. “The urgent things take priority, especially when something comes flying at you that you weren’t expecting.”
At the same time, like many local authorities, Hull City Council collects “shed loads” of data on this issue as well as housing and homelessness more widely. For example, the Housing Performance team tracks the landlord service, the Housing Options team measures prevention and relief services, all of which is used to feed into statutory reporting requirements as well as big funding bids.
It is common to many local authorities to find themselves in this position. Any given team, such as the housing team, will in theory have access to lots of data gathered about all the people using their services across the years. Monitoring is often very comprehensive and there is vast potential in the data gathered by teams across the country. But in practice, that data is rarely used to its full potential. “We wouldn’t use it in our day-to-day roles or for long-term planning. If we were writing a strategy or something we’d pull together some data, but it wasn’t embedded,” explained Louise.
The “revolving door” problem is a good example of how more efficient use of data could make a big difference. At Hull, the target cohort for this problem remained quite poorly defined, despite there being lots of data in the system. It was clear that a mindset change was needed - a shift in how the HCC teams looked at their evidence and data, which would help them to identify where they could best channel their resources. Louise’s experience was that
“until you step back and start thinking about those questions, you wouldn't know it was possible to figure out that kind of detail. We weren’t asking the right questions”.
Joining the CHI Accelerator was, for Hull, a chance to learn how to ask those questions, and use their data effectively.
Taking the holistic view
At Hull, the service delivery team are, like many, faced with multiple urgent problems on a day-to-day basis. We know that LAs need the time and space to step back and look at the problems they are facing in a new light, away from the day to day events of public service delivery. Programmes like the Telescope Connect programme and CHI Accelerator create that opportunity. Through structured learning journeys that build stronger connections, allow for headspace to look at the bigger picture, and provide effective tools to analyse what’s working well, councils like Hull can make big strides towards better outcomes.
Through the Accelerator in 2021, Hull underwent a 6-month structured learning journey in a supportive environment. They managed to take the time to step back and look holistically at their processes, and that led to some big impact. Quite quickly, it turned out that Hull knew more about the repeat homeless cohort than they first thought. The team focused on 18-26 year olds, who represent a quarter of all those who find themselves homeless again and make at least two subsequent housing options attendances. Seeking a 90% success rate on service users’ second call for service, the team designed a new approach.
What was vital here was that Louise had strong buy-in from above.
“We’re quite lucky in Hull that from my manager right up to our director, most people are fully on board with suggestions for innovation”.
We’ve seen in our previous programmes that despite energy and enthusiasm for change at the lower levels, not to mention multiple sources of evidence in favour of the proposed changes, senior buy-in can often be one of the biggest barriers to implementation. It sometimes doesn’t take much to get that buy-in - we’ve heard stories of senior ministers spending just a couple of hours with St. John’s Ambulance staff and having a complete transformation of mindset around health service delivery. But the kind of transformative change we try to generate at Telescope, and that Hull was hoping for, can seem scary at first glance if it’s presented as a done deal. This mindset change needs buy-in from the very beginning.
Feasibility vs impact
Hull was looking for interventions that would be both high-impact and also feasible to implement: “It was easy to initially start thinking about the transformative changes we might make to our operating model - but we quickly realised they were not not feasible. This was about looking at what we could actually implement quickly.”
It turned out, as is often the case, that even a small operational tweak could make a big difference. Siloed IT systems at Hull meant that service delivery teams couldn’t communicate very easily between themselves, making it difficult to access information about repeat homeless presentations and thus rendering support less effective. By creating a flag on the system which appears when someone presents as homeless for a second time, Hull created visibility for all teams across the system. For Louise, “that’s a big win”.
Once this cross-team communication solution was found, the team evaluated several different ideas to improve service delivery further for the repeat homeless. They came up with a proposed solution: to create a holistic approach and service navigation offer for everyone presenting for the second time. Here, the assessment of impact vs feasibility was crucial to Hull identifying areas where they had leverage to make change within the scope of their capacity. We often use an impact/feasibility matrix in our programmes, deliberately offering participants the chance to identify both low-hanging fruit and the longer-term exciting visions that will take more time to build towards.
Creating mindset change around evidence and data
The next stage in Hull’s journey is to take a case management approach which connects more actors to support someone presenting as homeless for the second time. The new plan will bring together youth and housing options teams around the table to discuss with the client and the rest of the group what the best options might be. It’s an exciting, radical new approach to case management that channels co-design and provides holistic support for the service user that could be transformative.
Louise is now the trailblazer for using evidence and data effectively within Hull. She explains that the team now knows much more about what they need to be collecting and how useful that data can be, so they can build those requests for information into contracts and commissioning calls.
“Because we have done all this, we are much more evidence-led and I can fly the flag for evidence. I’m getting a reputation for this evidence-based approach”.
She is a great example of an intrapreneur - those changemakers working within public service organisations and taking steps to shift ways of working from inside. It’s not an easy role - our board member Sarah Edwards will attest to that - but by working within the system, it can be easier to create sustainable changes to the status quo.
For local authorities, and many others working in policy or strategy roles, data and evidence have long been used in one way. A lot of data is collected, but it is often siloed between departments and used ineffectively to improve services. It also often sits separately from any qualitative evidence based on human experience, gathered in an empathy-based way. So Louise is absolutely right to note that “for the wider team it’ll be about a change in mindset”. As our recent workshop on design methods in public service showed, applying new tools to existing problems can give the much-needed space to think differently about policy and service delivery. And that’s what we really want to see more of in the coming years.
This case study forms the basis of the udpate featured on CHI’s website here.
Image credit: Whitefriargate
