New homelessness statistics: What do they tell us?

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)
published its
latest statistics on homelessness in England last week. The statistics have
changed in several ways – we explain here what they tell us.

What’s changed?

The latest statistics report on the quarter from April to
June 2018 and reflect two simultaneous changes:

• The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 (HRA) came into force on the 3 April 2018, giving local authorities new homelessness duties.
• Local authorities are now using a new statistics recording system known as H-CLIC (Homelessness Case Level Information Collection). The change in system has caused some data quality issues.

This means that the figures aren’t comparable with MHCLG’s previous quarterly homelessness
statistics series, but they do provide some new information. Before we explore
the statistics, we will briefly look at these changes and what they mean.

What does the Homelessness Reduction Act do?

Local authorities in England now have
a duty to work to prevent and relieve homelessness for all eligible
applicants. Eligibility is based on an applicant’s immigration status. They
are required to work with eligible applicants to develop a personalised plan
setting out the steps they and the authority need to take to secure or retain
accommodation. The aim is to reduce street homelessness and the need to place
certain households (i.e. those in a priority need category) in temporary
accommodation.

The ‘full rehousing duty’ owed to
those who are unintentionally homeless and in priority need (e.g. households
with children or vulnerable adults) remains unchanged, but by focusing more
prevention and relief work at an earlier point, it is
hoped that fewer households will reach this stage.

What is H-CLIC?

H-CLIC is a new statistical system for local authorities to
collect homelessness data and report back to MHCLG.

MHCLG
has said the aim is to provide more detailed, case-level statistics on
homelessness – for example, data on the ages and genders of household members
and their employment and benefit status. Previously, only household-level data
was available.

This first release doesn’t contain any case-level data and
has been designated as ‘experimental statistics’ while MHCLG works on data
quality issues.

There has been some criticism of the way the new system has
launched. Academics
from the University of Nottingham report that, while local authorities
recognise the long-term benefits of H-CLIC:

“Local authorities have been warning officials that [H-CLIC] is ineffective since it went live in April. The new homelessness figures for April to June 2018 are the first aggregated reports based on this new system. Entire local authorities have failed to return data for this period. For many others their returns are incomplete or contain
errors because they haven’t yet got to grips with the new system. The new
statistics are likely to under-represent how many people were homeless in this
period.”

MHCLG report that 322 out of 326 local authorities provided a response, of which some were partial responses. In some parts of the release, it has made estimates to scale up the available data to a national total.

What do the new figures tell us?

Around 60,000 households needed prevention or relief

The HRA means local authorities must now assess whether a household needs help to prevent or relieve homelessness.

Households that are threatened with homelessness within 56
days are owed help from the local authority to prevent homelessness and the
authority must work to relieve homelessness for those who are actually
homeless. The local authority doesn’t have to provide accommodation but should
support households to retain their accommodation or find an alternative.

Local authorities report that decisions were made on 64,960
households, of which 58,660 were assessed as being owed a prevention or relief
duty. Of these, 57% were owed a prevention duty and 43% were owed a relief
duty.

This figure under-reports the national total because it
doesn’t include the six local authorities that didn’t submit a report to MHCLG.
MHCLG also note a number of inconsistencies in the ways local authorities
reported this data, so the figures should be treated with caution.

Not many local authorities reported owing a ‘main duty’

If a household is unintentionally homeless and in priority
need, then the local authority owes ‘a full or main rehousing duty’. However, effective
prevention and relief work might reduce the number of cases that reach this
point.

The duty to relieve homelessness expires after 56 days for
households that are owed a main rehousing duty. MHCLG’s statistics only record
households as being owed a main duty after
this 56-day period has elapsed.

The number of main duty decisions and acceptances reported
by MHCLG is considerably lower than in previous years, as the chart below
shows. We know that:

• Local authorities made decisions about 11,630
  households, 58% fewer than the same quarter a year previously.
• They accepted a main duty for 6,670 households,
  51% fewer than the same quarter a year previously.
• The majority of the ‘accepted’ households
  (6,110) had applied before the HRA came into force but didn’t have a decision
  made until this quarter.

There are several potential reasons for this drop:

• One is the 56-day delay in recording main duty
  decisions. Many households who approached their local authority in the
  April-June period won’t have their main duty decision recorded until the next
  quarter.
• Prevention and relief activities may have
  successfully resolved households’ issues in some cases, meaning a main duty
  isn’t triggered.
• The data quality issues reported by MHCLG could
  be affecting the total.

The number of households in temporary accommodation is growing

Statistics on the number of households in temporary
accommodation are more comparable with previous releases.

Households can be placed in temporary accommodation in several
different circumstances – for example, they might be awaiting a decision on
their application, or owed a main duty and waiting for accommodation to become
available.

There were an estimated 82,310 households in temporary accommodation at the end of June 2018, up 5% on the same date in 2017.

Many households apply from the private rented sector

The new statistics also record where households were living at the time that they approached their local authority for help. Private renting was the most common type of accommodation – 30% of households owed a duty were in the private rented sector.

Almost half of households had support needs

The HRA requires local authorities to assess the support needs of homeless households. 47% of households owed a duty had support needs of some kind. The chart below shows some of the most common types of needs (note that households can have more than one support need).

What data will we get in the future?

MHCLG’s intends for its releases to become more detailed as local authorities get to grips with their new duties and with H-CLIC. The releases should eventually include case-level data, although a timescale hasn’t been announced for this. Over time, a clearer picture of how the Homelessness Reduction Act is working may emerge.

Cassie Barton is a Senior Library Clerk at the House of Commons Library, specialising in housing and planning.