Anyone in England or Wales who spots a person sleeping rough can report it through StreetLink, a national service the housing ministry has funded since 2012. The alert goes to the local outreach team, who go looking for the person and offer support. They can only help someone they find, and an alert that says little about where the person is can leave a team unable to find the person.
The clever bit
The ministry, its delivery partner Home Connections and 10 local authorities put AI guidance inside the alert form. As a reporter types, the system reads the entry and suggests useful extras: nearby landmarks, access instructions, a what3words location, clothing or other identifying details. A vague location triggers a nudge to say more. Professional judgement stays with the local authority outreach teams.
In the pilot, location descriptions grew by 45% and descriptions of the person by 54%. Failed outreach attempts caused by poor descriptions halved, from 36% to 18%. The share of people found after an alert rose from 16% to 23%. Nearly 89% of reporters said the prompts helped them give more detail. Home Connections says the pilot areas did better than similar areas without the prompts.
Hooray
Isabel Young, a Rough Sleeper Support Officer in Newport, said the what3words prompt made it "much easier for our team to find exact locations" where there is no formal address. All of the participating local authorities backed a wider rollout. The project's lead, StreetLink contract manager Vicky Sterrett, won the first Cabinet Secretary's AI Innovation Award for it in October.
What comes next
The feature is now live across England and Wales, as the government works toward its goal that everyone sleeping rough has a route off the streets by Christmas. The team's next steps are alert quality scoring, safeguarding detection and prioritisation, built with the local authorities that use the service.