The challenge
Cornwall Council receives over 3,000 statutory homelessness applications every year. In October 2022, Cornwall Council insourced a number of housing and homelessness functions. This change represented an opportunity to understand fully where the service was currently, and signal the start of an improvement journey towards “best in class”. A journey that maximises the potential of the recent changes and provides the service with a clear direction and the roadmap to get there. The Council wanted to appoint an independent, external organisation to complete a holistic service review of the current quality, value for money and effectiveness of the housing options service. The review needed to identify opportunities to improve and help facilitate the co-design of a new structure to move the service forward in the short, medium and long-term.
Our approach:
We completed a holistic review of the current quality, value for money and effectiveness of the service. The review needed to identify opportunities to improve, and help facilitate the codesign of a new structure to move the service forward in the short, medium and long-term. Our approach took both an “outside in” (customer’s perspective) and “inside out” (service/ organisational perspective) view through a range of activities; including practice/ ethnographic observations, mystery shopping, case file audit, partner and staff engagement, best practice review; and customer journey mapping. We also completed extensive data and benchmarking analysis around performance and value for money.
Our impact:
This resulted in a service redesign and transformation plan. We then owned the delivery of key actions in the plan which included supporting the restructure of the service, developing the Private Rented Sector prevention offer, developing the case and specification for an external mediation service, developing a private rented sector offer (PRSO) policy; and a performance framework for all levels and teams within the service.
