Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation appears in the account as a research partner with Crisis in documenting the scale and administrative classification of homelessness in the United Kingdom. The figures associated with their research make an important distinction: households requesting help are not the same as households officially accepted as statutorily homeless, and neither count represents a head count of individuals.

Research partnership

The research was undertaken by Crisis, a homelessness charity, together with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Its findings are presented as evidence about households who had applied to be listed as homeless or at risk of homelessness in 2013, rather than as a complete count of every person without secure housing.

Findings on homelessness

The research found that at least 280,000 households in the United Kingdom claimed to be homeless or about to become homeless. Officials accepted 52,000 of these as statutorily homeless, a category described in the account as applying to households with neither family nor friends able to house them. Many of the remaining 228,000 households received help from local authorities through the relief route. The figures therefore distinguish formal recognition from the wider group seeking assistance; they count households, not individual people.

Significance and limits of the figures

The account places the research alongside rough-sleeping statistics to show how different methods capture different parts of homelessness. A household application count encompasses people whose housing insecurity may not involve sleeping on the street, while a one-night rough-sleeping snapshot records a narrower situation. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s cited contribution thus supports a broader view of homelessness than the familiar image of a person bedding down in a doorway, while the figures themselves remain bounded by who applied for listing and how authorities classified their cases.