Homelessness and rough sleeping levels across England are hitting record highs. Research by Shelter published in December 2024 showed an increase of 14% in just one year. Local authorities play a vital role in supporting struggling households to avoid homelessness, yet these record levels leave them faced with a huge temporary accommodation crisis and unsustainable financial pressures. London is facing some of the most severe homelessness pressures in the country.

But these challenges are not unique to England. Homelessness is a crisis affecting millions of people worldwide. And one of the common, emerging threads to addressing it is the use of data and collaboration.

Knowledge exchange and the power of data and collaboration

In January, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend The International Journal on Homelessness Conference 2025 (*attendance fully funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies*), a platform for global and inclusive knowledge exchange on preventing, reducing, and ending homelessness. The conference convened around 400 people in person, representing diverse perspectives on addressing homelessness, from people with lived experience to practitioners to policymakers and researchers.

A key theme across the conference was how crucial data and collaboration are to enabling systemic change. Data is what helps us to understand people’s experience of homelessness – from entering homelessness, navigating through it, and leaving. It also helps us to identify the fault lines, gaps, and potential missed points of intervention. But we can only understand that holistic picture through collaboration. The journeys of those experiencing homelessness are so complex; interacting with a multitude of different services and often having to tell their story again each time, due to lack of join up between systems and different parts of the ecosystem.

How can we truly make informed decisions about how to support these individuals if we don’t fully understand their journeys, experiences and needs?

Examples of data and collaboration in action towards ending homelessness

LOTI’s Rough Sleeping Insights Project

The main purpose of my attendance at the conference was the opportunity to present LOTI’s work on homelessness and rough sleeping, alongside the Greater London Authority’s Rough Sleeping Programme Manager.

We spoke about the power of data collaboration in a system where individuals interact with so many different services. LOTI’s Strategic Insights Tool leverages machine learning techniques to identify where the same individuals crop up in different datasets, and presents insights, trends and patterns back to users. With all 33 London boroughs and 9 service providers sharing data into the tool, we are beginning to build a foundational understanding of how people move through the streets, local authority Housing Options services, and accommodation. We hope to expand that further by bringing in data from other parts of the ecosystem.

You can find out more in our full presentation deck.

The “Zero” Movement

Brisbane Zero

The Brisbane Zero Campaign aims to end and prevent homelessness for individuals, youth, and families, starting with those who are or have been sleeping rough. Embracing the Advance to Zero framework, they are able to know people who are currently or have previously been sleeping rough – including on the streets, in parks, tents, cars or cycling in and out of motels and emergency accommodation.

The framework includes:

• Knowing people by name
• Understanding people needs
• Identifying appropriate housing support
• Measuring progress and making data informed decisions
• Systems change

The things that really stood out for me were:

• using tools such as the Australian Homelessness Vulnerability Triage Tool (AHVTT), to help gather information on individual or family history, health, support and housing needs, and link people with appropriate services
• leveraging data to identify gaps and advocate for change
• emphasising the need for collaboration across housing and related systems to work towards better outcomes for individuals experiencing homelessness
• the combination of collaboration, data-driven insights and advocacy around tailored housing solutions

Community Solutions: Built for Zero

Community Solutions is a non-profit organisation that works to achieve a lasting end to homelessness that leaves no one behind. Built for Zero is a movement to measurably and equitably end homelessness. Founded in the US, now over 100 cities and counties have committed to it and to using data to change how local homeless response systems work and the impact they can achieve. The framing is around homelessness not just being bad luck or individual circumstances, but a systems problem.

A key feature of the Built for Zero movement is “by-name” data; a comprehensive data source of every person in a community experiencing homelessness, updated in real time. The aims of this are to:

• better match housing solutions with the needs of the individual
• help communities tracking the changing size, composition, and dynamics of their homeless population
• prioritise resources
• test system changes
• understand whether efforts are helping drive numbers down towards zero

The key takeaway here is that “systems are designed by people – and they can be redesigned to better serve people”. We shouldn’t shy away from asking ourselves difficult questions about why systems have been set up in the way they have, challenge whether they actually serve the outcomes we’re trying to achieve, and let ourselves reimagine them.

Key Reflections

This quote from my time at the conference really stayed with me: “Changing big messy systems like homelessness on a measurable scale takes many smaller nudges and micro shifts”. There is no single solution in the face of a crisis like this and we shouldn’t forget the impact of those small, iterative improvements.

Whilst the scale of homelessness may differ across countries, cities and communities, data and collaboration are key. And learning from each other’s approaches is sure to be a fundamental part of moving towards our shared goals to prevent and end homelessness.