The Dying Homeless Project, which tracks deaths among people experiencing homelessness, has published its annual research – and it makes for grim reading. Since 2019, more than 4,000 people have died while homeless across the UK, with someone now dying every 6.5 hours on average.

Between 2019 and now, there has been a staggering 85 per cent increase in the numbers of record deaths. The report points to a litany of severe failings. From unregulated and inadequate accommodation to the drastic cuts which have ravaged mental health and addiction services, the government is letting down the most vulnerable people in society.

The project is run by The Museum of Homelessness (MoH), a community-led museum and activist group. It aims to provide a more accurate view of the situation than is captured by official statistics; honour the memory of people who might otherwise be forgotten, and campaign for action on homeless deaths. We spoke with Jessica Turtle, the museum’s co-founder, to find out what this research tells us about Britain’s homelessness crisis and what must be done for the situation to improve. 

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these findings is the fact that the majority (83 per cent) of reported deaths took place in temporary and emergency accommodation, rather than on the streets. “I want to be clear that we’re not saying rough sleeping is safer,” says Turtle. “Rough sleeping is horrible, and comes with its own dangers. But when people get indoors and come into contact with services, that should be a moment where their life gets safer – and our evidence shows that they’re not. The services are not saving people.” 

In fact, the available services are sometimes so bad that people choose to stay on the streets instead. The MoH recently did an investigation on climate change and homelessness, which involved going out during extreme weather periods (whether boiling or freezing) and asking people on the streets why they hadn’t gone indoors. Often, they would hear, “I just don’t feel safe in the hostel that I’ve been allocated to.” According to Turtle, hostels are often badly run and can be dangerous spaces – especially for women and LGBTQ+ people. “There is a big mismatch between what services local authorities think is safe and what people who are homeless feel is safe,” she says.

The report reveals that there is a serious problem with “exempt accommodation” – a form of supported housing intended for vulnerable adults with “complex needs”, including people leaving prison, refugees, people with addiction problems or people fleeing domestic violence. While it’s supposed to be not-for-profit, unscrupulous private landlords are finding ways to milk local authorities for these placements – the higher rents they are able to charge means this can be a lucrative grift. “Exempt accommodation is supposed to be providing vulnerable people with care and support. Private landlords are claiming to be doing this, but for the most part they’re not, and there’s little oversight from local authorities. A lot of the time, people end up being left to rot,” says Turtle. According to a Guardian report published last year, organised crime groups have exploited the lack of regulation in the sector, taking millions of pounds in government money for exempt accommodation while failing to meet the most basic requirements.

While authorities are responsible for this lack of oversight, their placement options are sorely limited. “There's no social or council housing left – right-to-buy saw to that,” says Turtle. “But we shouldn’t just let them off on that basis – they need to be a lot more on it.” Considering how many of the reported deaths were related to addiction and mental health, it’s clear that the failure to provide support is a significant part of the problem. 

When it comes to addiction, there are often significant barriers in place which prevent people from receiving the help they need. If someone is in active addiction and reaches a point where they decide they want to enter into recovery, it’s important to get them into treatment as soon as possible, because these moments can be fleeting. But as it stands, this can take weeks, months or even years. “We were fighting on behalf of a community member for a year and a half to get them placed in rehab,” says Turtle. “ In the current system, there’s so many hoops you have to jump through. You have to go to three or four group therapy sessions a week for a certain number of months to prove you’re ready. Who is going to do that if they’re street homeless and in active addiction to heroin? It’s just unrealistic. And people can really spiral once they’ve made a decision to change their addiction, but they’re denied the help they need. It can have a really significant impact on people’s mental health.”

Britain’s homelessness crisis has been getting gradually worse for over a decade, ever since the Tories took power in 2010. But there has been a particularly sharp increase in deaths between 2019 and now. What changed in that period? “The pandemic had a huge impact on all services, and I think a lot of workers in these services are burned out,” says Turtle. Changes to immigration laws, too, have led to people slipping through the cracks of the asylum system and becoming homeless. The government has also increasingly adopted a punitive approach towards the issue, which is counter-productive: criminalisation isolates people further and pushes them away from getting the help they need. “It is not effective or in any way clever to create a massive wave of homelessness and poverty through austerity measures and then criminalise people who find themselves in poverty and homelessness,” says Turtle. “It’s no response at all – enforcement has never solved homelessness.” The combination of these more recent factors, along with the cumulative effects of a decade of austerity, means that the crisis is only getting worse.

While it’s a cross-generational problem, the Dying Homeless research points to a troubling disparity. With the caveat that this is based on a small sample (they only know the ages of a small portion of recorded deaths), the findings indicate that young people experiencing homelessness are at a greater risk of taking their own lives. “This disparity is the opposite in the wider population, where younger people are less likely to take their own life and older people are more likely to,” says Turtle. “It is just heartbreaking that young people are finding themselves in a situation that’s so desperate they can’t see any other way out.” Two years ago, the charity Centrepoint found that youth homelessness had increased by 40 per cent between 2017 and 2021. As of this year, the figures are still climbing.

“If you look at the stuff that Kwajo Tweneboa has been doing around the state of social housing, and other efforts like it, I think people now have a more nuanced and accurate understanding of homelessness” – Jessica Turtle

Troublingly, Centrepoint also found that young Black Britons face a disproportionate risk of homelessness. Whether it’s rough sleeping or the hyper-precarity of being shunted between different forms of temporary accommodation, it’s clear that homelessness is among the most urgent problems facing young people in Britain today.

As Turtle sees it, neither of the two major parties are offering anything close to a solution. There are some simple policy measures that would make a big difference – such as lifting the freeze on local housing allowance – but the Tories seem committed to making things worse with every decision. Instead, the life-saving work is happening at the community level. To address the addiction problem, some members of the Dying Homeless coalition have set up a new group, the People’s Recovery Project, which will help people experiencing homelessness bypass treatment and get the help they need, at the moment they need it.

While the perception of homelessness has typically focused on rough sleeping, at the expense of less visible manifestations of the problem, Turtle believes that the public perception is shifting for the better. “If you look at the stuff that Kwajo Tweneboa has been doing around the state of social housing, and other efforts like it, I think people now have a more nuanced and accurate understanding of homelessness.” But the government is still overly focused on rough sleeping – an approach which, as these findings prove, is insufficient – precarity can be wildly destructive in its own right. “They want to get people off the streets but there's no initiative to solve the housing crisis, improve people's accommodation, or make things fair for renters so that we can have security.” 

The answer to homelessness is not just about getting people indoors at any cost. “It has to be the right kind of housing and there has to be the right support in place. I think the figures show you that. We can’t have that flawed, myopic policy anymore. We’ve got to look at it as the complex problem that is and really start trying to solve it,” says Turtle. Having a roof over your head is simply not enough; we all have the right to secure, stable housing and a life free from precarity.

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