Prince William joins tech leaders at London Tech Week to strengthen action on homelessness prevention
Prince William joined Homewards at London Tech Week today, bringing the conversation on homelessness prevention into one of the UK’s most influential spaces for technology, business and innovation.
Speaking in the AI Arena, His Royal Highness was joined by entrepreneur and podcaster Jake Humphrey, Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE from Salesforce, Linda Gibbs from Bloomberg Associates and Solange Chamberlain from NatWest Group, to explore how data and technology can help stop homelessness before it starts.
The discussion focused on how better use of data, from financial signals to digital platforms, can help identify when people are at risk earlier, so support can be provided sooner. It highlighted the role that businesses, alongside government and the homelessness sector, can play in building a more preventative system.
The event also marked the launch of the UK’s first Homelessness Data Lab, led by Homewards in partnership with LandAid and Salesforce. The Data Lab brings together organisations from across sectors to test how data can be used responsibly and ethically to spot risk earlier and respond more quickly.
By working together and sharing insights, the Data Lab aims to help more people stay in their homes and avoid getting to crisis point.
Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE, President and CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, remarked that “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.”
Homewards’ partnership with London Tech Week will continue across the week. For the Homelessness Data Lab, focus now turns to delivery, as partners work to test and learn together to demonstrate that it’s possible to make homelessness rare, brief and unrepeated.
