What is homelessness?
Homelessness is not just about the people we see sleeping rough, this visible form of homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg.
Homelessness is much broader and includes households that are:
- ‘Homeless at home’ e.g. overcrowding, unfit habitation
- In temporary accommodation – night shelter, hostel, refuge, hotel, B&B
- Sofa surfing and other unstable solutions including intermittent hospital and prison stays
- Rough Sleeping, squatting
Across Britain there are currently 160,000 homeless households including families, couples and singles. If the current trajectory of homelessness continues, the number of homeless households is expected to almost double in the next 25 years.
The top three headline reasons for homelessness presentations at local authorities are as follows:
- Family or friends can no longer accommodate
- Ending of assured short hold tenancies
- Relationship breakdown
More households approaching the end of a private tenancy are finding it difficult to secure an alternative without assistance. This makes up 20% of accepted homelessness applications to Local Authorities.
In the WMCA area, five of the seven Local Authorities have significantly higher rates of acceptances of statutory homelessness than the national average. 4,312 households were assessed with 4,152 owed a prevention or relief duty under the new statutory homeless duties in January to March 2020.
- There are currently 4,206 households in temporary accommodation.
- 44 People were identified as rough sleeping during the 2020 Rough Sleeper Count across the WMCA area in a single night.
Homelessness is rarely the outcome of a single event or a circumstance. It comes about as a result of the interplay between structural issues and personal circumstances.
For example, there is a well-documented housing shortage in the UK and this
is most keenly felt in the social housing sector, which leads to a lack of truly affordable homes, particularly for those who are on low incomes or unemployed.
There are also other factors that then interact with that shortage of housing, which are specific to groups made more vulnerable as a result of:
- Low income
- Loss of employment
- Domestic abuse
- Poor physical health
- mental health
- Relationship breakdown
- Bereavement
- Custodial sentences
- Substance misuse
Services do not always work in a joined-up way so that even when people do seek help, the risk of homelessness as a result of these factors, may not be spotted. All of this means that opportunities to prevent homelessness at the earliest stage are often missed.