The Prince of Wales has declared that 'prevention is better than the cure' in the fight against homelessness, emphasizing that technology can be employed to 'keep people in their homes.' Speaking during a panel discussion at London Tech Week, William hailed the power of tech to enable workers in the sector to identify families and individuals at risk.
Homewards Initiative Launches Homelessness Data Lab
His Homewards initiative, a five-year project aimed at developing a blueprint to eradicate homelessness, has launched the Homelessness Data Lab. This national collaboration seeks to improve the use of data and technology to prevent homelessness. Members of the lab include major businesses such as Bloomberg, Vodafone Three, and the NatWest Group, who are working on projects to enhance coordination between frontline services, reduce response times, and improve signposting support for those experiencing early stages of difficulty.
William's Address at Olympia
Addressing a packed conference hall at London's Olympia, William stated: '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.' He added, '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.'
Expert Support from Salesforce
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. She stressed that information held on individuals would be used 'appropriately and responsibly.' Bahrololoumi explained: '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.'
