How do we measure progress towards ending homelessness for good?

There have been many pledges to end homelessness and rough sleeping over the years. While progress has been made, none have seen sustainable success.

As a What Works Centre, we look for inspiration from other areas where extraordinary results have been achieved. We learned that, to be successful, you need a clear articulation of your goal and robust measures to track whether what you’re doing is working.
“When we've not made progress, it’s because we haven’t figured out what needs to change and measured our progress towards it.”
Jeff Liebman
Harvard Kennedy School
That’s why we have developed a clear and measurable definition of what the goal of ‘ending homelessness and rough sleeping’ means in practice. This shared meaningful goal provides the common language and focus that is needed to align efforts to end homelessness and rough sleeping.
We have worked with partners across the UK to co-design a simple but powerful set of indicators that will allow any area to understand how effectively homelessness and rough sleeping is in the area and track their efforts towards ensuring that, if it does occur, it is a measurably rare, brief, and non-recurring experience.

By working with the same definition and set of indicators about what it means to end homelessness you can experiment and compare what works and what doesn’t in areas facing similar challenges.
Prevent
Reduce the prevalence of people experiencing homelessness in the first place.
Rare
Directly tracking the prevalence of homelessness nationally and locally.
Brief
Identify people experiencing homelessness and supporting them into accommodation.
Non-recurring
Support people who have previously been homeless to not return to it
Each nation in the UK has a slightly different way of measuring progress due to different policy commitments.

Soon we will be launching an interactive data dashboard that will take the elements of the framework and explore the data within them by local area. Get in touch If you want to stay updated on the progress of this work.
England
View England's framework
As of March 2022, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has been working with CHI to define how to meaningfully tackle rough sleeping in England.
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Scotland
Coming Soon.
Wales
Not yet available.
N. Ireland
Not yet available.
Explore these articles to find out more about how we're putting this into action, and watch this space for our soon to be released implementation guide