An official count of the deaths of homeless people would no longer be published in England and Wales under proposals to increase the efficiency of health data that campaigners have called “callous”.
In a move that advocates for homeless people fear will increase the invisibility of the most vulnerable and amount to sweeping the problem under the rug, the Office for National Statistics is consulting on dropping the annual bulletin, which showed an estimated 741 deaths among homeless people in 2021.
The plan is included in a series of proposed changes to official figures that the ONS says will provide “an improved and more efficient health and social care statistical landscape”.
The homelessness charity Crisis, which is urging the government to make a U-turn, said the plan was “deeply concerning, and will only ensure this needless suffering continues out of sight”.
“The injustice faced by people dying on the street must not go unreported,” said Francesca Albanese, executive director of policy and social change at the charity.
Gill Taylor, who leads an independent project at the Museum of Homelessness counting deaths among homeless people, said the proposal was symbolic of the way the government “sees homelessness as ‘a lifestyle choice’,” a reference to a tweet posted in November by the former home secretary Suella Braverman.
“Now is not the time to be turning away from who these people are and why they died,” she said. “Everywhere in the public sector, change only comes as a result of an evidence base, and without it we are afraid change won’t happen.”
Taylor said scrapping the statistic would be “a very callous thing to do at a time when we know there is an absolute crisis in homelessness and more people are dying”.
The ONS will continue to collect the data on the deaths of homeless people, but will include it in overall mortality figures rather than publishing it separately. It said the data, which has been published since 2018, was experimental and amounted to an estimate.
“It had some important caveats around time periods of the data, definitions of homelessness, and alignment to statistics on the total number of homeless people,” a spokesperson said. “These issues are difficult to resolve and reduce the utility of the release.”
Homeless Link, a coalition of homelessness charities, said it accepted the current data was not perfect. But Sophie Boobis, head of policy, said: “With homelessness and rough sleeping increasing, we should be investing further in this important data series rather than scrapping it, allowing ourselves the chance to prevent further premature deaths.”
The consultation closes on 5 March.
