SARTH (Single Access Route to Housing) is a partnership project between three local authorities and five housing providers across North Wales, a Welsh Government-supported initiative designed to streamline and simplify the process of allocating suitable housing. United by a single allocations policy, SARTH is striving to improve both customer experience and efficiencies with its new housing applications triage and banding process.
In order to achieve these aims, the SARTH partnership has implemented a triage system, prioritising and signposting customers to their most suitable housing provision across all three authority areas. This speeds up the application process, offering an improved customer experience and helping the organisations involved be much more efficient with their resources.
The SARTH member organisations approached Capita’s software services housing business to create the solution they needed, with a view to achieving full integration with their existing Capita OpenHousing system.
Jane Parry-Evans, head of ICT, Cartrefi Conwy, said, “We felt an integrated solution developed from software we already understood with a supplier we knew, rather than the alternative interface-only options offered by any new supplier, would help us to achieve greater efficiencies during the transfer to a new allocations policy and better reporting on the combined processing of our housing applications.”
Previously, each partner kept its own list of housing applicants, meaning each applicant needed to register with multiple agencies. They could then suffer delays as information was either shared between each agency or needed to be recaptured and processes repeated.
Paul Seymour, corporate director resident services, Clwyd Alyn Housing Association, said, “It makes sense for local authorities and housing providers to take an integrated approach which provides a better service for housing applicants.”
Sam Parry, housing services manager, Conwy County Borough Council, said, “Centralised information about each applicant allows the best housing option to be automatically signposted, recognising those with the highest priority. We are confident this will help us achieve a greater success rate for applicants in finding the housing they need, and frees our staff’s time for support elsewhere.”
