ONS Partners with UK Homelessness Org

In the UK, the Centre for Homelessness Impact and the Office for National Statistics have jointly developed a tool to provide insight into the conditions required to tackle homelessness.

In the past, studies of homelessness has involved different measures being used across different devolved governments and other organisations. The new framework of indicators brings this data in to one place, and is designed to complement the existing range of official statistics produced across government. These indicators are based on goals from the Centre for Homelessness Impact's SHARE Framework, which suggests a range of principles for how preventing and ending homelessness should be framed and assessed based on current evidence.

Bringing together data relating to the wide range of factors that have an impact on homelessness, the tool has been designed to help people address the root causes of the problem, while allowing policy makers and charities to measure the country's progress towards preventing homelessness at a population level. The platform shares more than 30 homelessness indicators, covering a range of subjects from local authority homelessness applications through to house building and public attitudes; to assess which factors are impacting current levels of homelessness.

Hugh Stickland (pictured), Head of Strategy and Engagement at the ONS, comments: 'With this project we aim to find and gather this data to create better statistics which can help to tackle homelessness. By working with specialised groups like the Centre for Homelessness Impact we are able to share knowledge and skills to create tools which can help policy makers make informed decisions which can have a real impact'.

Web sites: www.homelessnessimpact.org and www.ons.gov.uk .