This short blogpost updates a post from just over a year ago, using the latest statistics on statutory homelessness in England, as they relate to households with a person with learning disabilities living within them. As far as I can tell (and others are better placed than me to know about this) we know relatively little about homelessness among people with learning disabilities in the UK, although it looks like people with learning disabilities (often unrecognised) are more likely to experience homelessness.
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 March 2023.
The graph below shows the number of households with a person with learning disabilities who were owed a homelessness duty in each quarter year. There are some fluctuations, but overall 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 first quarter of 2023 (January-March) this had increased to 4,700 households, an increase of 76% in less than five years.
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 5.9% of all households in Quarter 1 2023.
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 11.0% of these households in Quarter 1 2023.
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 which are getting worse quickly, for which there is virtually no policy attention or action.
Update: David Abbott has alerted me to an excellent research project with autistic people who experience homelessness completed by his colleague, Beth Stone - I've linked to a blog describing the project, which also has links to more in-depth descriptions of the research.
Update 2: David's sent me this link to a must-read, authoritative report by Beth Stone and Emily Wertans for the Centre for Homelessness Impact on Homelessness and disability in the UK - published in May 2023. In fact - read this instead of my blogpost!
