Homing in

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One in every 200 people in the UK is homeless. This stark figure, in housing charity Shelter’s 2019 analysis of government figures, shows the scale of the problem facing the government, local authorities and charities. The issue is not just a social and humanitarian one – it is also financial. The 2015 report At what cost, by homelessness charity Crisis, estimated that 30 people sleeping rough could cost £600,000 a year, depending on the services needed.

Data analytics can help councils decide how to use their sometimes scant resources wisely when tackling homelessness. The Centre for Homelessness Impact, a charity that uses evidence tools to help address homelessness, worked with the Office for National Statistics to develop a platform called Share, with the aim of informing how preventing and ending homelessness should be framed and assessed.

The charity also runs a Housing Cost Calculator, which uses councils’ data to estimate how much it would cost to implement different housing policies for homeless people. Councils need to have data showing the number of homeless people in their area, the types of accommodation they are in, and those people’s characteristics, such as the support they require and whether they have recourse to public funds.

Part of its objective was to help reduce costs by taking all relevant data into account, providing a ‘high level’ overview of the solutions available to local authorities to house homeless people – such as whether to move them to temporary or permanent housing – and using it to address the challenges specific to the local area.

The calculator emerged from rethinking the centre’s priorities and understanding the challenges councils face in tackling homelessness, according to Guillermo Rodríguez-Guzmán, head of evidence and data at the Centre for Homelessness Impact. The first councils the centre worked with were Southwark, Sutton and East Ayrshire. Using publicly available ONS data, the reporting platform shares more than 30 homelessness indicators, covering a range of subjects from local authority homelessness applications to house building and public attitudes.

In cases where there was a lack of information, the centre used assumptions based on the estimates of council employees. These were especially needed in the escalating and rapidly developing Covid-19 crisis, when thousands of homeless people needed to be housed quickly, often in hotels, to help stop the spread of the virus. A side-effect of the use of council estimates has been to underline their employees’ expertise, says Rodríguez-Guzmán. When compared with more recent ONS data published later, the team was pleasantly surprised at their accuracy.

“The local authorities are in contact with the realities of homelessness, so connecting with them could be a lot more insightful than just waiting for data on the subject to be released three months later,” says Rodríguez-Guzmán. “You need to trust people on the ground. No-one was capturing information, so we turned to those we expected to know better – and it turns out they did.”

Once the tool has the basic data it needs from local authorities on the homelessness issue in their area, it creates scenarios and estimates the cost of moving people between different types of accommodation. It does this by combining action areas, goals and indicators, and is based on data and estimates supplied by local authorities. For example, for someone moving into social housing, it would estimate furniture costs as part of the scenario. The aim is to underline the long-term savings that could be made by moving someone off the street permanently, and reduce the burdens on multiple services by improving homeless people’s lives.

“One of the points we wanted to make was that, if you move everyone to settled housing, you are not only ensuring they have a house for a longer period, but it is also cheaper for the local authority,” says Rodríguez-Guzmán. “That was a really important element in how the tool was designed.”

Developing the calculator was not without challenges. The UK benefits system is highly complex, which meant that under-35s had to be excluded, while other people were subject to benefits caps, depending on their personal circumstances. Data quality was patchy across council areas, and there was a lack of harmonisation between the four nations of the UK.

The tool has helped in practice. Bloomberg Associates, the consulting arm of charity Bloomberg Philanthropies, works with cities to improve the quality of life for residents. It worked with the Greater London Authority, using the centre’s tool to look at how to move homeless people into permanent accommodation in the city, the likely cost of doing so, and whether costs could be offset. In some cases, using the tool reduced the costs by 80%.

This article was first published in the October 2020 issue of Impact.