Homelessness in London: How the pandemic affected rough sleeping
Posted on July 5th
The number of rough sleepers in Greater London decreased last year, in large part due to the government’s Everyone In initiative, which provided funding to local authorities to house people in hotels and other accommodation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, there has been an increase in the number of rough sleepers in the capital seen repeatedly by outreach workers throughout the year, suggesting longer and more frequent periods of living on the streets.
Experts and advocates say the government needs to invest to turn the Everyone In initiative into a long-term, sustainable policy programme, and do more to tackle the underlying causes of homelessness.
How many rough sleepers are there in London?
New data from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (Chain), managed by homelessness charity St Mungo’s, found that in the period from April 2021 to March 2022 there were 8,329 homeless people sleeping without adequate shelter in Greater London, a decrease of 24% compared with last year.
The largest decrease was in “new rough sleepers”, whose numbers fell by a third (32.4%) compared with 2020/21. Meanwhile, “stock” rough sleepers – the category Chain uses to define people recorded for the second year in a row – fell by 4% compared with last year, and “returners” (those who were recorded as rough sleeping after a year or more gap) fell by 11.5%. This is primarily due to the impact of Everyone In.
The numbers decreased steadily in the 12 months through to March 2021 due to the Everyone In funding, but in the past year have begun to increase again somewhat after the lifting of the 2021 lockdown.
The total number of rough sleepers seen in the past year was 6% below the numbers seen pre-pandemic in the year 2018/19, with new rough sleepers 8% below.
But this reduction in numbers exposes a different trend: that the people rough sleeping in London in the past year are doing so more frequently. While overall the number of rough sleepers fell, the number of people recorded as rough sleeping more than six times throughout the year actually increased.
It’s important to note that someone recorded six times will most likely have been rough sleeping far more than that: two-thirds of new rough sleepers said they had already been rough sleeping for at least a week when they were first spoken to by an outreach worker.