The Homelessness Data Lab is a national collaboration aimed at improving the use of data and technology to tackle the issue.
The Prince of Wales has said “prevention is better than the cure” in the fight against homelessness which can employ technology to “keep people in their homes”.
William hailed the power of tech to enable those working in the sector to identify families and individuals at risk during a discussion at London Tech Week.
His Homewards initiative – a five-year project to develop a blueprint to eradicate homelessness – has launched the Homelessness Data Lab, a national collaboration aimed at improving the use of data and technology to prevent homelessness.
William told a packed conference hall at London’s Olympia: “As we all know, in life prevention is better than the cure, and so with the data and the technology we can deploy, being able to keep people in their homes, their jobs, their communities, families, at school, that is inherently much better than if we then deal with problems once they become homeless.
“The damage that someone goes through to get to that place is inevitable, sometimes almost very, very difficult to bring them back in, so if we can stop all that pain, that damage getting done, and that surely is a much better way of doing that.”
Members of the Homelessness Data Lab include businesses like Bloomberg, Vodafone Three and the NatWest Group, who are working towards developing projects to enhance co-ordination between frontline services, reduce response times and improve signposting support for people experiencing the early stages of difficulties.
Zahra Bahrololoumi, chief executive of Salesforce UK and Ireland, a cloud-based customer relationship management platform and official Homewards supporter, also joined William on stage for the discussion.
Her company is supporting the lab with its expertise and she stressed information held on individuals would be used “appropriately and responsibly”.
She added: “The lab will now run a series of very short chart-focused experiments, tests, exploration around this data, because if we can make (homelessness) predictable, we can prevent it, so it’s really to understand the causes.
“There’s such a rich set of data, there’s years and years’ worth of anonymised data from people that have presented themselves as homeless that we can really explore and mine.”
