Fresource Friday: a guide to homelessness duties

If so, today's free resource might be right up your street.

If you're in Wales that is.

If you're in England

Although, if you work for a council homelessness team in England you might still want to take a look.

You may benefit from having something similar when the Homelessness Reduction Bill becomes law, so you can:

• identify when actions must (or can) be taken on a homeless application,
• identify the case management options at each stage of the process, and
• identify when several notifications can be combined, to ease the administrative burden (have you seen how many notices will have to be sent to homeless applicants?).

If you're interested in me creating something similar for you, summarising the new English duties, contact me.

How the guide came about

I wrote the first draft in early 2015, when I was helping a council prepare for the new legislation in Wales. It proved invaluable when helping them create new workflows for managing cases.

Thorough mapping of the processes was essential to prepare for the inevitable increase in homelessness applications, and to ensure a fit-for-purpose case management system.

But before starting on the process maps this guide - bringing together the essential information about each duty (and power) - was an essential preliminary step.

What the guide covers

The guide aims to help you quickly identify:

• when a homeless duty is owed,
• what action must be taken when performing a duty, and
• the various ways in which each duty can be lawfully ended.

There's a chapter for each homelessness duty. And the pdf contains bookmarks and hyperlinks to help you navigate the document.

As such it's a useful resource for staff who aren't familiar with the legal framework.

Accompanying letters and forms

If you work for a Welsh council and need a particular letter (e.g. to notify an applicant that you're accepting or ending a duty) there are hyperlinks at the end of each chapter to template documents in the Resources section.

To access the letters you'll need to:

• work for a local authority or housing association;
• create a free account with your work email address, and
• either buy some credits, or take advantage of the free credits offer (see the training page).

Useful?

Let me know what you think of the guide.