Earlier this month Gary was invited to speak at a Westminster Briefing in London together with fellow speakers Roger King, Director of Safer and Stronger Solutions, Amerdeep Somal, Commissioner, IPCC, Nick Budden, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Janette York, Community Safety Consultant and Aaron Devereaux, Head of ASB, Sovereign Housing
The main focus of the event was to discuss how agencies and practitioners were working together to improve their response to ASB and to look at ways to make responses more victim-centred. Gary’s presentation covered current good practice and demonstrated the way multi-agency partnerships can work to enable early intervention, the identification and prevention of repeat victimisation.
Gary said “The key to effective partnership working is through better information sharing”. Organisations such as the Police, Councils and RSLs need to create an environment where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and this is pretty much what E-CINS has been helping practitioners to do for the last two years… One of the reasons we have been able to make this happen is through our policy of agile development, driven by our practitioners. These current users, all experts in their field, are located all over the UK, feeding back to us what works and what we can improve on. This bottom up approach to developing the system ensures it works for the people who actually use it in their day-to-day work.
We have also taken a non commercial approach to maximise participation. We don’t want organisations to worry about how many users can access their system or how much data they can put on to the system. That’s why we don’t charge for individual user licenses. What we have done, is created one unique neighbourhood management system that allows organisations to manage any number of issues from ASB, IOM and Troubled Families to Domestic Violence, Hate Crime and Restorative Justice so that they no longer need to work in silos. If you have gangs that are causing ASB then both can be managed on one system.
The E-CINS model does represent the new world for partnership working across the UK and as a social enterprise we know it will not just ease the burden on tax payers pockets but also help practitioners, victims, offenders and the vulnerable. The hope is that this new world will inspire commercial software providers to change their restrictive practices and for organisations to demand that they do.
Organisations no longer need to work in silos, E-CINS has made that environment where everyone does know what everyone else is doing. More importantly, it has created the ability for organisations to wrap support around victims, vulnerable persons and their families.