Homelessness and rough sleeping risks and drivers in Great Britain: a composite survey modelling approach

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

March 16, 2026

Summary:

Despite growing levels of homelessness and increased policy attention to it across Britain, modelling to highlight individual risk factors alongside broader drivers has been hampered by the obvious fact that many people experiencing homelessness are not clearly in a household and hence not captured by mainstream household surveys. Framed within a critical realist ontology, a composite survey approach is developed, combining a specialized survey targeting people at risk of severe deprivation with a major national household panel dataset, to enable predictive models to be developed using data which includes significant representation of hard-to-reach and non-household populations. Models predicting homelessness and rough sleeping are derived and compared, highlighting the roles of key individual and structural factors, appropriately sequenced in time and able to interact. Vignettes are used to show how the risks vary dramatically between households in different situations, while the potential role of such models in micro-simulation or prediction of impacts of different scenarios is discussed.

Published in

Housing Studies

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2026.2638386

ISSN

2673037

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

Online Early

© 2026 the Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. the terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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