Service: EHPS - Early help profiling system to identify children and families considered vulnerable

A predictive system called the "Early Help Profiling System (EHPS)" used in Hackney County (London), which uses data from a variety of different sources to identify children and families considered vulnerable and at risk of child abuse to the municipality. The data includes statistics from different government agencies, such as school attendance, housing information, economic indicators, and others. This allows early intervention to these families, avoiding the occurrence of a crisis with more expensive follow-up actions. Each month, the social workers team gets a list of 20 families who are of high risk and unknown to the social workers at that time. Social workers then decide based on the information to conduct an early intervention, such as support from a child centre or a health assessment. It has been reported that the model had a high accuracy, with more than 80% of the risk alerts deemed valid, despite challenges with continuous updating of some data sources. The system was expected to help councils save around one million euro per year by having early, targeted interventions. However, the system was heavily criticized. The nature of the data collection and the risk assessment was very opaque as data is processed by a private company, leading to concerns by citizens. Those whose data was used were not informed and it was kept a secret which indicators were to determine the risks, since a private company was responsible for the development and argued that the information was commercially sensitive. Others noticed that the system was only put in place to cope with the austerity measures put in place, as the system was advertised to maximize payments from the Troubled Families programme. Now Hackney Council stopped working with the programme as it did not realise the expected benefits.