Research shows that prison leavers without settled accommodation are almost 50% more likely to reoffend
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) asked us to design and build a digital service to make sure people leaving prison are found suitable accommodation and don’t become homeless on release
The MoJ’s Community Accommodation Service (CAS) makes sure prison leavers who would otherwise be homeless have a safe and secure place to stay in temporary accommodation. Supported by other rehabilitation programmes, it gives people time to find permanent housing, work, and get registered with other essential services.
The aim of CAS is to reduce reoffending and the likelihood of someone ending up back in prison. With benefits not just for the individuals concerned but also feeding into policy goals to reduce overcrowding in prison and reduce reoffending.
Research shows that prison leavers without settled accommodation are almost 50% more likely to reoffend.
Outcome
We designed and built a new centralised end to end service so probation officers across England and Wales can make sure people leaving prison have an appropriate place to stay.
The new service has now rolled out across all regions. It reduces the resource and effort needed to complete applications and manage bookings, freeing up valuable time for staff. We have imported risk information to ensure people are placed in the right setting. Updates are sent to key systems across the Probation Service, so officers have access to all the information they need about an individual.
In creating the service we have reduced MoJ’s reliance on legacy technology, in support of their longer term technology strategy. The service collects and shares performance data, enabling real-time management of prison leavers and accommodation spaces. As well as the longer-term measurement of outcomes, so we know if it’s being successful in reducing reoffending.
The challenge
The original service was established in 2021 across 5 of the 12 probation regions within England and Wales. It was largely offline, requiring a lot of back and forth of emails, faxes, phone calls and forms between probation staff and homelessness prevention teams (HPTs).
With complex spreadsheets to manage accommodation capacity and bookings, it also required probation staff to cross reference and pull information from several existing databases. Regional differences quickly developed.
We were asked to design and build a digital service which enables:
- probation staff to make an online application for transitional accommodation on behalf of someone leaving prison
- HPTs to assess the application for eligibility and suitability
- the person to be booked into a suitable room
MoJ also wanted to:
- reduce the time spent creating and assessing referrals into the service
- improve the accuracy and relevance of the referral data, and
- improve the accuracy of the management information reporting
What we did
We took an agile approach to this project, focusing on user research to help steer our prioritisation. With a staged rollout of the service in parts which helped to de-risk the process and allowed us to learn more quickly from users.
Research
User research was critical to delivering successful outcomes and we ran multiple rounds of user interviews, workshops, and moderated testing across the project phases. We learned about both the pain points and the good points within the existing process. This helped us understand priorities and what could be reused, so we could deliver value for money and get improvements into users’ hands as quickly as possible.
Accessibility and usability is a thread which runs throughout our work. This is about more than making sure the product works with assistive technologies. Our users were short on time and needed easily digested information and a robust and easy to use digital service. Alongside user testing we built in manual and automated accessibility testing, as well as an internal consultation with the MoJ accessibility team.
We also submitted the service to a third party accessibility audit. Scoring a 90% pass rate on Level A and an 86% pass rate on Level AA.
Technical approach
Our technical approach focused on building integrations with existing MoJ systems like nDelius, OASys, NOMIS, and other HMPPS services including HMPPS Auth and Audit. This was critical to our goals to reduce the time it takes people to complete and assess an application, and to improve the relevance and accuracy of the data.
Building client skills and capability
Our project stakeholders were subject matter experts within the prison and probation space, but had less experience in designing and building digital services. They were also new to agile ways of working.
Our team worked closely with them to demonstrate agile principles through our user-centred approach, and involved them in our ceremonies to ensure they had visibility of our plans and recommendations. They were also included in user interviews and playback sessions to hear user needs and feedback first hand.
By the end of the project they were actively advocating for more user-led decision making and prioritising tasks according to their effort and impact.