Homelessness in England

What is this homelessness data about?

Every year, district councils complete and return a form called the P1E to the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG).

CLG shares the information as a "live table".

The graph above shows the outcomes of homelessness decisions across the whole of England, by year. This divides people who apply into four "main" groups which summarise a complex system of judging whether the person is "statutorily homeless" or not. They might be:

  • Accepted as homeless and in priority need (blue)
  • Not accepted as they are eligible, homeless, in priority but became homeless "intentionally" (red)
  • Not accepted as they are eligible, homeless, but not in priority need (green)
  • Not accepted as they are eligible but not homeless (purple).

So why also publish it on Cambridgeshire Insight Open Data?

This data is so useful when looking at trends across the country, we decided to reformat it as an open data file, combining all the data from 2006/7 to 2014/15 in one place. The idea is, this will help us spot trends in homelessness. And since it is so useful, we thought why not publish for the whole country (rather than just Cambridge area) as those numbers were freely available from CLG.

Points to note

If any figures were not provided to CLG, or if the figure was less than 5, we have presented it as "0" (zero) rather than as a dash or "not available". This should help users when trying to process and analyse the numbers. We have also removed all sub-totals and rows for any local authority who does not complete the P1E return, for example county councils are named on the CLG live table but no numbers are provided. So in our open dataset on districts who complete the P1E form are listed. We have also added the current ONS area codes to each row of data, even if those codes were not in use at the time the return was made. This should help if you want to use the ONS codes to find the authorities they are interest in - or if you want to create formulas using the URI.

The data

The open data set is available here http://opendata.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/dataset/homelessness-england

Context and background is provided as part of our strategic housing market assessment here http://www.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/shma (see chapters on homelessness)

The CLG live table is available here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/homelessness-statistics

Contact

Please get in touch with sue.beecroft@cambridge.gov.uk if you have any queries on this or would like to suggest any improvements.

Meeting housing need and tackling homelessness is one of the Cambridge sub regional housing board's four priorities. To find out more, please visit http://www.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/housing

We'd love you to use this open data, please do tag @CambsInsight (https://twitter.com/CambsInsight) in your tweets!