Data collected for the Youth Homelessness Databank provides a clearer picture of the true scale of youth homelessness in the UK.

There is no accurate source of information on the scale of youth homelessness in the UK. In England, while the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)1 publishes annual statistics on the number of young people accepted as statutorily homeless, this only represents a small proportion of the total number of homeless young people.

Centrepoint’s Youth Homelessness Databank addresses this data shortfall by creating a central source of information on the number of young people presenting to their local authority as homeless or at risk of homelessness, as well as those who are assessed and subsequently accepted as being statutorily homeless or recorded as being successfully helped in some other way. Centrepoint has built a databank that can help to form a more accurate understanding of the state of youth homelessness in the UK.

This report includes a number of findings from the Youth Homelessness Databank data. More data can be found on the Youth Homelessness Databank website2, the open access source of all data collected at a local, regional and national level. It was launched in 2015 and has since accumulated data on the majority of local authorities in England dating back to 2012/13.