Statutory homelessness statistics and people with learning disabilities

This short, hasty and ill-informed blogpost briefly summarises the latest statistics on statutory homelessness in England, as they relate to households with a person with learning disabilities living within them. [Before you ask, yes, looking through statistical releases to see if they contain anything about people with learning disabilities is a hobby of mine].

To quote this typically lucid report from the House of Commons Library on statutory homelessness in England, "Local authorities have a statutory duty to secure accommodation for unintentionally homeless households who fall into a 'priority need' category. There is no duty to secure accommodation for all homeless people". 

There are a range of statistics presented in the live tables, one of which presents information on the number of households owed a homelessness duty broken down by whether anyone in the household has a list of particular support needs, which includes 'Learning disabilities'. Because of changes to the law in 2018, statistics are available for each quarter (three months) from April 2018 through to December 2021 (I haven't included more recent provisional information).

The graph below shows the number of households with a person with learning disabilities who were owed a homelessness duty in each quarter year. Apart from a dip in Quarter 2 in 2020 (when the government introduced temporary measures to alleviate homelessness in response to the COVID-19 pandemic), the number of households has rapidly increased. In Quarter 2 of 2018 (April-June) there were 2,670 households with a person with learning disabilities owed a homelessness duty - by the last quarter of 2021 (October-December) this had increased to 3,710 households, an increase of 39%.

How big a proportion of households owed a homelessness duty are households with a person with learning disabilities? The graph below shows trends in two percentages over time. 

The first (the blue line) is the percentage of all households owed a homelessness duty by a local authority that are households with a person with learning disabilities. This shows that households with a person with learning disabilities represented 4.3% of all households owed a homelessness duty in Quarter 2 of 2018, increasing to 5.6% of all households in Quarter 4 2021.

The second, orange, line is the percentage of households with an identified support need owed a homelessness duty that are households with a person with learning disabilities. [Not all households owed a homelessness duty officially have a support need]. This shows that households with a person with learning disabilities represented 9.3% of households with a person with support needs owed a homelessness duty in Quarter 2 2018, increasing to 10.5% of these households in December 2021.

This is not an area I know about at all well, so there may be horrible errors of interpretation here. And these statistics will clearly miss out a lot of people with learning disabilities who are homeless, for a variety of reasons. But to me these look like highly worrying statistics, for which there is absolutely no policy attention or action.