So, How Many People Are Homeless In England? It’s Complicated!

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As of autumn 2016, there were an estimated 4,134 people a night sleeping rough on England’s streets, more than double the number in 2010 and a 16% increase on the year before.

These are estimates based on local authorities either conducting a street count on a single night or making an estimation based on intelligence gathered from local services. So, with only a few days to go before the general election, what are the major political parties saying about homelessness?

According to the BBC website:

  • Labour has pledged to end rough sleeping within its first term in government by making 4,000 additional homes available for people with a history of being on the streets.
  • The Conservatives pledge to halve rough sleeping over the course of the next parliament and eliminate it by 2027 by establishing a homelessness reduction taskforce.
  • The Liberal Democrats have pledged to end “the scandal” of rough sleeping, in their general election manifesto – but don’t say how.
  • The Green Party say they would give local authorities the same duties towards single people and childless couples as to families, while UKIP don’t have a specific policy on homelessness, but say they will take measures to address homelessness among veterans.

Although homelessness is often associated with images of people sleeping on the streets, in reality rough sleepers make up a small proportion of the total homeless population. In 2016, local authorities in England accepted 59,260 households as being statutorily homeless and agreed to house them.

This means councils had decided those people or families did not have somewhere to live that they had a legal right to occupy, which is accessible and physically available to them and which it would be reasonable for them to continue to live in.  It’s hard to say how much this figure overlaps with the number of rough sleepers recorded.

There is a large group of people who don’t have a place to live but who are not considered vulnerable enough in legal terms to qualify for housing.

Single adults with no children who don’t have any of the specific additional vulnerabilities listed below will generally not be entitled to housing if they become homeless.

Councils consider the following groups to be in priority need:

  • Households with dependent children
  • Pregnant women
  • People who are vulnerable in some other way, for example, because of mental illness or physical disability.
  • Teenagers aged 16 or 17
  • Those aged age up to 20 who have previously been in care
  • People who were vulnerable as a result of time spent in care, custody or the armed forces
  • People who have had to flee their home due to violence or the threat of violence.

In 2016, 116,200 households in England applied to their councils for housing assistance because they said they were homeless.  Of those, there were almost 30,000 English households that councils agreed were homeless but said they did not have a duty to provide them with housing.  Numbers of households accepted as homeless and eligible for housing assistance had been falling sharply from the early 2000s until the end of 2009. Since then, they have been gradually rising.

To find out more, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39745253