London Housing Foundation, in partnership with Homeless Link, has launched a fully updated version of the Atlas of homelessness services. The 2020 release of the Atlas features updated information about services, as well as brand new information including a visualisation showing specialist homelessness health services.
The Atlas provides an extensive overview of the homelessness sector by collecting new information and bringing existing datasets together. The best way to explore the data is through the Maps page.
New to the Atlas this year is our health services map. In our first data collection we identified 38 specific homeless health services for people with experience of or at risk of rough sleeping, as well as 16 day centres offering health services. Thirteen of the services identified were specialist primary care, largely GP services. The next largest category was hospital discharge services (12), five of these are Pathway teams, three are delivered by St Mungo’s. We particularly welcome feedback on this new element of the Atlas.
Another new area of the Atlas is the GLA-funded services infographic. This shows that the Mayor’s office commission services to tackle rough sleeping amounting to more than £19 million per year and breaks the funding down by themes and projects.
The Atlas focusses on services that work with people or households without dependent children and primarily those who are rough sleeping or at risk of rough sleeping.
Headlines from this year include:
- The Atlas shows that there are nearly 9,900 supported housing and hostel accommodation spaces in London.
- The data shows that there are over 130 organisations providing services in London. A great many services in London are not part of a larger organisation but are rather stand-alone or independent services that do not have other projects in London.
- This year for the first time we have collected information on the size of Housing First projects. We identified 17 Housing First schemes for a total of 261 people.
- Twenty boroughs commission a local service to provide the street outreach for rough sleepers in their area. Seven boroughs rely on the GLA-commissioned London Street Rescue service run by Thames Reach for street outreach and 26 commissioned their own outreach services. Many boroughs also now have an addition services from the Rapid Response Team, also a GLA-commissioned Thames Reach service, which specialises in reaching people who are new to the streets.
- The Atlas shows that in 2019 there were three No Second Night Out assessment hubs, as well as several ‘staging posts’ which provide emergency shelter. These are run by St Mungo’s and together these services provide 187 spaces for people who have been contacted sleeping rough by outreach teams in London.
We are releasing the 2020 refresh of the Atlas in a radically changed environment – please see our previous blog for information on the Atlas in light of the response to Covid-19.
For further commentary check out the Atlas Insights 2020 – and use the interactive maps and other visualisations available on the Atlas.
We welcome comments, corrections and suggestions! Please get in touch with the London Housing Federation Project Manager becky.rice@lhf.org.uk or the Senior Information Manager at St Mungo’s gareth.thomas@homelesslink.org.uk.
