Housing Employment Connections (HECs) update
A timely report covered by Inside Housing again identifies the rise in unemployment among social housing tenants; you can read the article at Inside Housing website.
The HECs project is our intervention for tackling worklessness among social housing tenants. The project has gathered a head of steam through a range of meetings with providers and our partners over the last 5 months. We are on course for a launch of our approach at the start of September following a period of rapid IT development.
“Combining best practice from within the Home Connections partnership with the creative brains in our team, will deliver a transformational project” Joe McLoughlin, Business Development Manager at Home Connections.
The following is a high level view of our plans:
When a home seeker logs on through Home Connections they will complete a survey regarding their employment and training needs. HECs will act as a gateway submitting their details to local Information Advice and Guidance (IAG) organisations and Learning and Skills (LSC) providers (with their permission and within the regulations permitted by Data Protection). These agencies will then work with the individual and/or signpost them to other agencies.
More than web links are offered. HECs will be able to track the progress of individuals too, in order to monitor the effectiveness of the project. Importantly, HECs will also assemble a list of jobs by grade (entry level etc) in the locality of the homes in which the home seeker is interested.
A final project report will detail all the learning, processes and results from the project as well as producing recommendations that can be shared with other CBL providers and policy makers.
Thinking beyond the 4-5 month live pilot period, Home Connections are already in discussions with its user base within the local authority and RSL sector about how the project can continue, be adapted to their local priorities and be expanded in its scope.
Harrogate happenings
We are really looking forwarded to Harrogate this year and will be promoting our latest government sponsored project on worklessness and the work we have been doing around overcrowding. Worklessness and overcrowding are two of the big themes in housing at the moment and our new project is very forward thinking and timely.
Worklessness
The project now has a name and a logo; good starting points really but also a whole lot more and is well into development.
The project is called “Housing Employment Connections” or HECS for short and is sponsored by the Greater London Authority (GLA).
Please come and visit us at Harrogate this year we will be in the main Hall M, Stand 303. We will be available throughout the conference 17,18,19 June 2008.
Welcome from Chief Executive
Welcome to the revamped corporate website for Home Connections. This site aims to keep you up to date with all the latest developments in choice-based lettings. (CBL).
Home Connections is proud to have been one of the pioneers of CBL - with a record of developing CBL services from 2001. When I first started as the project manager in October 2001 there was much skepticism as to the relevance or long-term viability of CBL in England and Wales. Critics argued that CBL would never work for vulnerable applicants, that it was not relevant to high demand areas or that it would lead to widescale abuse. More than 10,000 lettings and several million bids on Home Connections alone have proved the critics wrong. In fact increasing aspects of housing services are being delivered through a choice-based approach.
The history of Home Connections is one of steady and continuous growth. In 2002 we launched a CBL pilot in a deprived inner city ward near Kings X, London - which had a significant Bengali population. Within months the success of the service led to councillors in other wards clamouring for the service to be extended. In the course of just a couple of years we had extended across 5 boroughs in London. In suceeding years over one third of London boroughs have signed up to Home Connections making us by far the largest provider in the capital. We have also extended to provide CBL to Birmingham and a large number of housing associations across England and Wales to provide single borough and sub-regional CBL services. In total we have over 50 customers for our CBL and Housing Options services - with Peabody Housing Trust and the London Borough of Bromley selecting Home Connections during the last few months. During the course of the last few years we transformed our identity from a highly sucessful project into a non-profit company limited by guarantee.
Our focus is on delivering a high quality and feature-rich CBL service. Interestingly, 5 out of the top 10 highest rated authorities in England and Wales use Home Connections as their CBL service provider, confirming our association with high quality and high performing authorities.
We have remained faithful to our vision of putting “the home seeker in the driving seat” by transforming balance of power between the housing landlord and the home seeker in favour of the latter. We now have a multitude of features on our CBL portals that allow housing applicants to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of supply and demand for social housing so as to decide on which Housing Option is most appropriate to their particular set of circumstances.
The story of Home Connections is one of continuous innovation. We were the first to pioneer online self-assessment - with some of our landlords saving up to £1 million through an online assessment and registration approach. Studies have shown that our totally information technology based approach has worked for our relatively deprived client group - but with the proviso that monitoring, support and advocacy services are available for those unable to use or access the requisite IT. In fact between 80%-90% of the bids for an average Home Connections landlord now comes through the web. The sucess of our web-based approach has also reduced or obviated the need for costly newspaper advertsing - saving hundreds of thousands of pounds for councils and RSLs. We are also proud to have pioneered ‘virtual viewings’ for social housing - with exceptionally positive feedback from physically disabled and out of borough applicants. This concept has been so sucessful that we have now developed several ‘virtual neighbourhoods’ of properties and amenities across several boroughs in West London. In 2006-07 we developed a toolkit for an accessible housing register for London as part our winning bid for phase I of the Capital Moves project. The concept of the AHR is now being discussed right across England and Wales. We have also developed unique tools for tenants to model their own solutions to housing overcrowding - which is proving particularly useful for those who have no chance of obtaining a home through CBL.
For further information on any of these issues or other Home Connections projects feel free to contact me at ninesh.muthiah@homeconnections.org.uk or on 07984 884 343
