2019 Homelessness Hackathon

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On Tuesday 25 June FutureGov, Housing 2019 and Inside Housing organised a hackathon to find innovative ways to end homelessness.

Why we did it

Homelessness currently stands at a horrifying level in the UK. Over 4,600 people sleep rough every night according to the last official count and tens of thousands of people live in temporary accommodation. Almost 600 homeless people died in 2017, at an average age of less than 45. The number of deaths has risen by 24% over the last five years.

These figures are clearly unacceptable and we must take action. While government involvement, such as supporting the building of new social housing, is clearly vital, everyone has a role to play. The Homelessness Reduction Act has placed new responsibilities on councils to support homeless people across the UK, but there’s more that needs to be done.

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What we did

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Housing 2019, Europe’s largest housing festival and the Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual event, presented a unique opportunity to bring together housing experts to address a problem affecting every locality and housing provider. Homelessness is a pressing issue that requires coordinated partnership to support people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness.

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On the opening day of Housing 2019, we invited hack participants to collaborate and design new solutions contribute to ending homelessness.

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Participants with a wide range of life and professional experience collaborated in teams to come up with innovative suggestions and solutions. The ideas were voted on by the event audience, shared with the Inside Housing readership on Wednesday 26 June and the winning idea was announced at The Fringe on Thursday 27 June.

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The event took place inside a purpose-built space. Around the room we showcased inspiration from great work done to date from the UK and abroad, providing a constant reminder that the ultimate purpose is to create ideas that will effect real, lasting change.

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Hack attendees learnt new tools and experienced new ways of working to create shareable and reusable content and assets. Experienced facilitators encouraged cross-sector collaboration, guided attendees to build tangible ideas for use in the immediate future and helped develop valuable new skills that will help us innovate and create change across the sector.

And these were the ideas that came out of the hackathon...

What next?

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Bishop David Walker, chair, Manchester Homelessness Partnership and Mark Southgate, chief executive, MOBIE announced the winner on the Fringe on 27 June 2019.

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WINNER Virtual addresses with lockers and a service to get your ID and a bank account. Install lockers in local council and housing association offices that rough sleepers can use as an official address. Combine this with a service that makes it very easy to request any missing ID documents such as your birth certificate, national insurance number, passport, scan them into a virtual locker, and put them in the physical one, and then use these ID documents to open a bank account.

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And without hesitation GM Homes Partnership agreed to pilot this idea for us.

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Sarah Cooke, programme manager, GM Homes Partnership ends her comment piece saying ‘it’s amazing what can happen when we come together’ and we all look forward to reporting back on the progress of this idea at Housing 2020.

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