Keeping homelessness officers up to speed with HPA2

Locata’s homelessness system is now being used by more than 115 local authorities across the country.

The HPA2 system was launched in 2018 to help officers with their new duties under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017.

The system was essentially an upgrade to Locata’s existing Homelessness Prevention and Advice software that had been built 10 years previously with the help and support of several local authorities.

One of the reasons so many homelessness teams use HPA2 is the speed and precision of updates to the system, often driven by new requirements from the Government.

For instance, in February we upgraded every HPA2 system with new functionality to help with the Rough Sleeper Initiative.

This update was free and allows each council to send live data to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (D-LUHC) through the DELTA system about rough sleeping in their area.

It also means that HPA2 users can report, monitor and deliver effective casework on rough sleeping by using the pre-built tasks and questions in the system.

We have also recently rolled out a small set of new features to HPA2 to help homelessness officers capture information about Ukrainian nationals.

This is on top of a recent update to ensure good data gathering and integrity across cases where vulnerable people have support needs as well as a complete revision of all the 155 homelessness template letters in the system informed by changes in caselaw since 2018.

This ties into new work we are undertaking to tailor a series of training courses that will give advice and support to homelessness officers, designed to cover the homelessness process and any legal aspects of case management. Underpinning the courses will be a quiz on all aspects of the duties required of homelessness officers that will be easy to use and fun to engage with.

There is a series of videos showing how HPA2 works, if you would like to know more. Simply follow this link.

Alternatively, please contact us by email at this address enquiries@locata.org.uk