Housing options advice maintenance overview
When considering the content to be included within a housing options advice gateway, the goal must always be to make the right knowledge available to the right people at their point of need. When devising individual components of this knowledge library - the advice statements - it is important to consider how best to present a more rounded assessment of a person's housing options and sustainability needs. To assist people in making the most of their housing opportunities, these statements should endorse the benefit of planning ahead and encourage service users to explore aspects of their lives that will help to sustain their preferred housing, such as economic and social factors. Historically, people seeking advice through housing options services were more likely to be referred to social housing, even when other housing options might have been appropriate. In structuring the knowledge bank of advice statements, it is therefore important to include possible alternatives that might resonate more closely with a customer's long-term housing aspirations.
Some advice statements might be considered generic, and relevant to all housing enquiries, such as how a local authority assesses the needs of individuals, or the banding system in operation used to prioritise applications against set criteria. Other statements will be specific to a particular housing option type (or workflow), the spectrum of which is at the discretion of the end user, but set against a backdrop of ever-expanding and increasingly more complex possibilities, especially in respect of people who cannot afford to purchase outright. Hence, combined statements might be constructed to address quite diverse circumstances, such as:
The opportunity to preview an advice statement at any stage of the creation process enables the end user to verify that its intended appearance, use of formatting, text alignment, etc. are all correct and match the desired output. At the point of preview, the system compiles all components of the advice statement in its current state of progression, mirroring how it will be presented to the customer as part of a housing options' enquiry. Overall, the focus of the advice statements should be to help promote personal development and independence, and improve the end-to-end experience for the customer, culminating in the creation of a housing pack that is tailored to that enquiry.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of housing options advice maintenance, including: