Youth Homelessness in the UK: Homeless Link Report

The report that informed LandAid’s strategy to support 10,000 young people from 2024-2029…

As we prepared for our new strategy, we commissioned Homeless Link to write a comprehensive report summarising what is known about youth homelessness in the UK today.

Despite the limitations to the available data, it’s a rich report with lots of insights that are well worth taking the time to explore – the executive summary is a helpful place to start to avoid getting lost in the detail!

If you’re short for time, these are some of the key insights we took from the report:

  • Young people face challenges particular to them – that’s why we provide grants to charities that offer specialised support that’s responsive to the needs of young people experiencing homelessness
  • Marginalised groups of young people face increased risks and have different needs – that’s why we ensure some of our funding goes to charities that provide specialised support to vulnerable groups
  • There is a framework for ending youth homelessness: the Positive Pathway model – our focus on housing provision meets the needs outlined in stages 3-5 of the positive pathway model, whilst our employability programme is one part of addressing stage 2 of the model
  • There are inconsistencies and known gaps within the data – that’s why we’re working with partners to gather, share and analyse the data available to us as the largest funder in the UK that is solely focussed on ending youth homelessness

Read the report to find out more…

Or keep reading to find out how our strategy is responding to these findings…

Young people face challenges particular to them…

What did the report say?

Young people fall into homelessness because of the lack of emotional, practical and financial resources that support most young people in their transition to adulthood, with the most common cause of youth homelessness being relationship breakdown, most often with their family.

Young people are also particularly vulnerable to gatekeeping by local authorities, whereby they are refused support on the basis of not meeting priority need criteria. Furthermore, when they do receive support, young people report that they do not receive the care they need and, in fact, sometimes feel more unsafe than they do on the streets.

What are we doing to address this?

Our vision is to end youth homelessness. We recognise the importance of a strategic and tailored response to the particular experiences of young people (aged 16-24) facing homelessness, and that’s why we provide grants to charities across the country that provide specialised support for young people. We also know that the range of projects we support fit within a framework that has been developed to identify how to end youth homelessness (see ‘Positive Pathway’ below).

We are also part of a campaign for the government to adopt a national strategy to end youth homelessness and we will continue to make the case for this as we work with partners in the private, public and third sectors.

Marginalised groups of young people face increased risks and have different needs…

What did the report say?

Studies reveal that individuals can be more at risk of homelessness as a consequence of their identity or background. Poverty is nearly always a factor, but additionally gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and immigration status, as well as exposure to childhood trauma, violence and gang crime, and involvement with mental health or learning disability services and children’s care or criminal justice systems, all play a significant role in how vulnerable young individuals can find themselves facing homelessness.

Indeed, the experiences of homelessness can also vary depending on the identity and background of young people: many of these factors greatly influence how difficult it is to seek practical support and navigate routes out of homelessness (e.g. young Black men experiencing homelessness are more likely to be diagnosed with a severe mental illness and sectioned than their peers); specific needs can arise from experiences that are particularly common for one group of young people (e.g. young women are more likely to be homeless due to domestic abuse); and certain risks can be particularly prevalent for certain groups (e.g. young women and young people identifying as LGBTQ+ are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation).

 

What are we doing to address this?

We’re aware that, just as the needs of young people can go unmet by general homelessness services, the specific needs of marginalised groups can go unmet by general youth homelessness services. That’s why we review our grants to ensure that the needs of groups that are disproportionately affected and/or have specific needs are being met, and we recognise that funding a range of specialised projects in addition to general projects is needed to achieve this.

We are working with partners to establish a ‘positive pathway’…

What did the report say?

Understanding the factors that disrupt a stable progression from the dependency of childhood to the self-reliance of adulthood are key to approaching a comprehensive solutions strategy. Despite the bleak picture painted by the data, there are organisations and areas of government working to increase access to affordable social and privately rented housing and implement early prevention and assistance measures across the UK, and the report highlights some of these initiatives.

The report also highlights St Basil’s influential ‘Positive Pathway’ framework, which identifies the network of housing provision and preventative initiatives needed to end youth homelessness (meaning that it is almost entirely prevented and, where it does occur, it is rare, brief and non-recurring).

 

What are we doing to address this?

With our grant making, we are particularly focussed on housing provision (stages 3 – 5 of the model), but our new employability stream also offers targeted intervention (stage 2) aimed at preventing young people from falling back into homelessness, and our place-based approach will allow us to co-ordinate our support with partners to ensure a comprehensive response to youth homelessness in target areas.

You can find out more about our new strategy here.

There are inconsistencies and known gaps within the data…

What did the report say?

Whilst there are existing plans to reduce rough sleeping in the UK, there is no unified national strategy for ending and preventing homelessness in general (though this is now a part of the new government’s plans), and certainly not to end youth homelessness. This absence of direction means that England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales all have different approaches, points of intervention and ways of defining what it means to be homeless. The result of these variabilities (aside from a lack of strategic focus across the UK) is a lack of consistency in the statutory data quality across the UK, meaning that grasping the way that homelessness is impacting young lives is restricted.

And there are other challenges too – for instance, hidden forms of homelessness, such as sofa surfing, that appear to disproportionately affect young people can go undetected and remain excluded from statistics.

Without a comprehensive understanding of the current situation, it is challenging to propose targeted solutions to end youth homelessness.

What are we doing to address this?

We’ve updated our reporting framework to begin collecting more comprehensive information from our charity partners, both in terms of the outcomes measured (informed by a panel of young people from Youth Voice with lived experience of homelessness who identified the outcomes that were important for them to overcome their experiences of homelessness) but also in terms of improving our understanding of the profile of youth homelessness (for example, asking about the living situation of young people prior to being accommodated).

We’re also using HACT’s Social Value Insight tool in order to produce a social value analysis of the projects we support.

Finally, we are working with partners to improve the youth homelessness data that’s gathered and increase the transparency, availability and utility of this data.