I joined the Council Housing ASB team in Council Housing in 2010. We work with council tenants and leaseholders who are experiencing ASB and with any neighbours, regardless of tenure, who might also be affected.

My role is Victim and Witness Risk Assessment Co-ordinator which focuses on victims of ASB.  I meet regularly with colleagues who are my equivalents in the police  to work out how best we can support victims of ASB. We provide victims with a SPOC so that they have a single point of contact who they know they can contact and who will contact  them at agreed intervals.  We find this offers continuity to the victim and a better level of service.

We have been using ECINS since the beginning of 2011 when Sussex Police in Brighton and Hove adopted it as a request from ACPO following the Pilkington case.  Initially all partner agencies used it solely as a multi agency risk management tool for vulnerable victims of ASB this involved working with the perpetrators to change their behaviour by non legal and/ or legal means in order to resolve the ASB and thereby reduce risk for victims. Since last October my team has extended our use of ECINS to include our case work on not just ASB but also in the areas of domestic violence and housing fraud.

ECINS has now become our main case management system and it has really enabled and encouraged partnership working.  Basically it has allowed us to fill the gaps. All the agencies that are signed up now have a forum for live discussion to mitigate the risk of ASB to victims, Caseworkers can get the relevant information they need and quickly decide in a multi-agency manner how to best manage it.

We do still meet face-to-face with partners but working remotely in a multi-agency way means we no longer need to bring each other up to speed when we do meet.  We don’t have to waste time going over old ground, instead we can decide, in a timely fashion, what actions each can take to best support victims and we can agree timescales.

ECINS essentially works like a history marker, giving all the agencies the important facts, making sure they know what’s going on in realtime, speeding up processes with all appropriate agencies involved so you’re not repeating and duplicating efforts.