Tackling homelessness means addressing a range of society’s most pressing issues.
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When you meet someone experiencing homelessness, it’s easy to wonder how they ended up there. Every person facing life without a secure home has their own story and complex web of circumstances that resulted in homelessness.
It might be a sudden job loss for some, a health crisis, or the breakdown of a relationship. For others, it’s tied to systemic issues like the lack of affordable housing, incomes and wages that just can’t keep up with rising rent prices, or inadequate support after leaving care or the armed forces.
While some causes of homelessness are deeply personal, most are rooted in broader societal problems beyond an individual’s control. Understanding why homelessness happens – and why it can be so difficult to get out of – is crucial in the fight to address and ultimately prevent it.
The problems that lead to homelessness are often systemic and have very little to do with an individual’s actions. A lack of support for those leaving care, the armed forces, prison or even hospital can leave someone with nowhere to go apart from a hostel or the streets.
Larger social and economic problems are among the most common causes of homelessness. The high cost of living, for example, is devastating for people who were already just managing to pay for the roof over their heads, and those situations are made all the worse by the UK’s stagnant wages.
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A lack of affordable housing is a major contributor to homelessness, as is the benefits system failing to pay enough to match private rent costs. Anti-poverty and housing charities like Shelter are calling for a social housing revolution to end Britain’s housing crisis. They want the government to build 90,000 new social homes per year to have any hope of meeting the demand for affordable housing in future.
“A chronic shortage of social homes combined with rocketing private rents is tearing communities apart,” said Polly Neate, the organisation’s chief executive. The issue is “pricing families out of their local areas and pushing over 151,00 children into homelessness,” she added.
“Families are forced to live out of suitcases, stuck in grotty homeless accommodation for years.”
Individual factors – such as the breakdown of a relationship, domestic abuse or substance issues – can lead to homelessness as well as family background issues like disputes, sexual and physical abuse from parents or guardians, or a previous experience of family homelessness.
As well as the causes of homelessness looking different for many people, the way that homelessness manifests can look different too. Rough sleeping is just one of several types of homelessness. Someone might find themselves in a situation known as sofa surfing, when a person or household is forced to stay temporarily with friends and family. Others might be stuck in temporary accommodation like B&Bs, where the facilities are often unsuitable, for months or years waiting for a council house to become available. Gathering definitive statistics on the rate of homelessness can be tricky because of the many types of homelessness, and how often people are forced to go without being seen or supported by authorities.
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A total of 317,430 households needed support from councils in England in 2023 – the highest on record – and those people would be referred to as statutory homeless, which refers to those who engaged with local authorities for help.
The causes of homelessness are varied and complex, which is why addressing it means dealing with more than homelessness itself. Poverty, harsh conditions for migrants like the no-recourse-to-public-funds policy, and an out-of-control rental market are just some of the wider problems that must be tackled if homelessness is to be reduced.
Do people choose to become homeless?
On the whole, no one chooses to be homeless. The vast majority of people are forced into homelessness either through personal or systemic problems.
That said, a council can consider someone to be intentionally homeless under the Housing Act 1996. The act states: “People should take responsibility for their own accommodation needs and not behave in a way which might lead to the loss of their accommodation.”
Failing to do so can lead to someone with priority need being considered intentionally homeless and can see them “owed a lesser duty” by the council.
Entrenched homelessness can affect attitudes to homelessness. A long time spent on the streets can see people adapt to the lifestyle of sleeping rough, and make it more difficult for them to engage with support services, which can be a particularly difficult habit to break. This is especially tricky in cases of mental health and substance issues, if organisations aren’t set-up in a way that makes it possible for marginalised people to ask for or accept help.
People with more complex needs might require homes with specific accommodations in order to live there too – properties may need to be adapted to help mobility, for example, or support might need to be on-hand for mental health or addiction issues. This makes it even more difficult for some people to secure a stable home where they can thrive, even if they do present to support organisations.
That’s why a “Housing First” approach is often heralded as an effective method to end homelessness. Renowned for virtually eradicating street homelessness in Finland, the model proposes giving rough sleepers their own property coupled with wraparound support to help them adapt to their new surroundings and work on issues that might have caused them to become homeless in the first place.
Crisis estimated that at least 309,000 people were homeless by the end of 2023, including sleeping rough on the streets, sheltering in vans or sheds, or staying in B&Bs. That’s one in every 182 people in England alone.
Homelessness can happen to anyone, but some groups are statistically at a higher risk of it than others. Census analysis by the Office for National Statistics showed that people in an ethnic minority group, disabled people, and those with poor mental or physical health were disproportionately vulnerable to homelessness.
Of all people identified as homeless, around two-thirds were men and one-third were women.
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Young LGBTQ+ people are at a particularly high risk of homelessness, with some figures suggesting they’re as much as 120% more likely to be without a secure home compared to the rest of the population.
How many people are homeless in Britain?
A total of 25,910 households in England needed council support to avoid becoming homeless after receiving a section 21 notice in 2023, the highest ever. Meanwhile 30,272 open homelessness cases were on Scottish local authority books between April and September 2023.
In Wales, the latest statutory homelessness figures showed 15,306 applications for support from local authorities with homelessness between April and September 2023.
As for the number of people rough sleeping, the latest official count estimated a total of 3,898 people were sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2023 in England. That stat is up by more than a quarter on the 3,069 people in 2022 and more than double the 1,768 counted in 2010 when the Tories came to power.
The Labour government has pledged to scrap section 21 evictions through the Renters’ Rights Bill, expected to come into force in Summer 2025. There are likely to be caveats in the legislation that allow for no-fault evictions in cases where, for example, a landlord wants to sell the property, but it’s possible the new laws will reduce the number of people being made homeless in this way.
Preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place is more effective than trying to lift people out of homelessness.
Preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place is the most effective strategy, which involves tackling its root causes – financial insecurity, lack of affordable housing and insufficient support services. The Housing First model focuses on providing stable housing for people before addressing other needs like employment support or healthcare.
Strengthening the social safety net is essential. By making sure that people leaving care, prison, or other institutions have adequate support and housing plans in place, a significant source of homelessness could be massively reduced. Government investment in the welfare system, mental health care, non-judgemental addiction support and accessible social housing all have a role to play.
In the meantime charities, councils and third sector organisations are struggling to plug the gaps.
What is the UK doing about homelessness?
The Westminster government mobilised to help people experiencing certain levels of homelessness during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as helping rough sleepers into temporary accommodation as part of the Everyone In scheme and temporarily banning evictions.
But homelessness levels have spiralled since then. After Keir Starmer won the keys to No. 10 in the 2024 general election, the Labour government committed to developing a cross-government homelessness strategy as well as abolishing section 21 evictions.
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Chancellor Rachel Reeves also said the government would deliver 1.5 million new homes while in power in a bid to curb the housing crisis, as well as measures to protect social housing being sold off through the Right to Buy scheme.
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