Annual figures for each local authority in England on the outcomes of actions to prevent or relieve homelessness.
Under the Homelessness Act 2002, local housing authorities must have a strategy for preventing homelessness in their district. The strategy must apply to everyone at risk of homelessness, including cases where someone is found to be homeless but not in priority need and cases where someone is found to be intentionally homeless. This means that prevention can be offered to any household, rather than a subset of the population considered eligible for assistance under the statutory homeless legislation.
Homelessness prevention refers to positive action taken by the local authority which provides someone who considers themselves at risk of homelessness with a solution for at least the next six months. This is done by either assisting them to obtain alternative accommodation or enabling them to remain in their existing home.
Homelessness relief occurs when an authority has been unable to prevent homelessness but helps someone to secure accommodation, even though the authority is under no statutory obligation to do so.
This data set brings together the returns for each local authority, from 2009-10 to 2017-18 in one worksheet, based on the government's live table number 792 which provides each year's figures in a separate tab. The data is exactly the same from both sources, this re-formatting simply aims to help use and re-use the data more quickly and easily.
In 2017-18 we have added region codes for each district, and have published a separate data set which gives the totals for each region and the whole of England. The 2017-18 version replaces previous versions, as it simply adds seven columns for 2017-18, alongside the columns for each previous financial year.