Stats and facts

About the databank

The Databank is the only central source of UK youth homelessness statistics beyond the figures on statutory homelessness and rough sleeping collected by government. It gives a clearer picture of the true scale of youth homelessness across the UK.

To tackle and ultimately end youth homelessness, we must improve our understanding of how many people experience homelessness across the country and what happens to them once they seek help. This project aims raise awareness of youth homelessness through open and easily-accessible data, and in doing so, help communicate a more realistic image of youth homelessness than official data sources currently provide. It is open for anyone to use.

Changes by region

Across the United Kingdom, we estimate that almost 136,000 young people aged 16-24 presented to their local authority as homeless or at risk of homelessness between April 2022 and March 2023. This represents a five per cent increase compared to the previous financial year, when 129,000 young people faced homelessness.

Areas with a decrease in youth homelessness

• Northern Ireland 2,900 (-10%)
• Wales 6,000 (-1%)
• East Midlands 9,900 (-15%)
• Yorkshire and the Humber 9,300 (-9%)

Areas with an increase in youth homelessness

• Scotland 7,500 (+6%)
• England 119,300 (+6%)
  • East of England 15,100 (+14%)
  • West Midlands 13,700 (+14%)
  • South East 16,800 (+12%)
  • South West 11,300 (+11%)
  • London 20,200 (+10%)
  • North East 5,400 (+8%)
  • North West 17,600 (+4%)

Reasons for homelessness

This breakdown of reasons for homelessness shows the most often given reason is family no longer willing or able to accommodate (England only data).

Support for young people varies across each nation, and this leads to national differences in our data collection.

For more information about national differences

A note about data quality and completeness

We obtained data from local authorities in England by sending Freedom of Information requests. Central government does not currently publish data broken down by age. We obtained data for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales from their respective central government departments.

We publish the data exactly as the local authorities provide it. So there may be some cases where the number of young people presenting, and their subsequent pathways, does not add up. We try to challenge any instances of this with councils, but where do not receive a correction or a clarification we publish as we received it.

Where we receive data that doesn’t look quite right, we will query this with local authorities. It is worth noting that some councils struggled with the new data collection duties within the Homelessness Reduction Act. With this in mind, the information in the Youth Homelessness Databank should be taken as an estimate.

Using the data yourself

The Youth Homelessness Databank data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows you to distribute, remix, tweak and build upon our work, as long as Centrepoint and the Youth Homelessness Databank are credited for the original creation. If you have any questions about the data, email us at YHDatabank@centrepoint.org.

Data protection

We create, host, administer and maintain the Youth Homelessness Databank in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. All data on this site is aggregated and values under 5 have been suppressed to prevent identification.

Contact us

If you would like further information please contact the Centrepoint policy team: YHDatabank@centrepoint.org.