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Section 4 Techniques and Tools

Using stories of homelessness: South Lanarkshire Council

South Lanarkshire Council have used stories to get homelessness service user feedback. They used local statutory and voluntary sector homelessness services to identify and collect stories of their clients’ experience of using homelessness services. The council provided clear guidance to the agencies in collecting the stories so that they focused on the issue. The agencies provided support to their clients and ensured that they were able to give their informed consent to the process. Guidance was provided on ensuring anonymity within the stories themselves to protect the identity of the story tellers.

The stories were produced in written form to be used at a local authority wide conference on homelessness in February 2005. The conference was attended by staff from the council, voluntary sector and other partner agencies that work with homeless people. At the conference the stories were read out by staff (where possible, those who had worked with them to write the stories). Those people who wrote their stories were also invited to attend the conference, and one did so.

The stories had a very powerful impact. They highlighted the complexity of the different services with which people had to engage and enabled the different agencies present to see how their role fitted into the bigger picture. The conference provided the impetus to improve the service and strengthened joint working between agencies. It recognised that the staff were doing a good job, but that there was a need to share more good practice.

Reflections on using stories

The South Lanarkshire experience provides some useful lessons. Where there is no culture of previous service user involvement this approach may well be profoundly challenging. There is a danger, as with other approaches, of raising unrealistic expectation of change. However, there is a chance that the process will be a way of opening up opportunities for change.

In the South Lanarkshire case, the stories did provide a valuable impetus for change in a situation where a new homelessness team had recently been established. The stories may have given a skewed impression of the service and some staff may have found this threatening. It is important to set ground rules that stress that the process is about hearing the story in order to improve services, rather than to allocate blame. One approach would be adopt an appreciative approach that briefs storytellers to consider something that worked well for them.

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