GREEN PASTURES
Housing the homeless and poor
without discrimination or favour

Statistics

This page was last updated on 5th November 2008

Homelessness

  • Green Pastures estimate that there are over 500,000 homeless individuals in the UK.
  • In the UK there are 400,000 hidden homeless (rough sleepers, bed & breakfast, hostels, night shelters & refuges, people due for discharge from institutions, overcrowding in concealed households, owner dissatisfaction in concealed households, risk of eviction, involuntary squatting & people who are living in severe overcrowding). Crisis
  • Over 900 families’ homes are being repossessed each week.
  • Ex-offenders leave prison with £48 to last a month.
  • The cost of homelessness in the UK is £33 billion per year.

   Need

  • Over 260,000 households in England are on waiting lists for properties with 3 or more bedrooms. Only about 5,000 social rented homes of this size are built each year.*

  • There are nearly 4 million people, or 1.6 million households, on waiting lists for social housing, and only 170,000 coming available each year. Up to 4 in 10 households are on waiting lists for council housing in some parts of England. There could be five million people on the social housing waiting list by 2010, the Local Government Association has warned.

  • This morning over 100,000 households in England will have woken up in temporary accommodation - twice the 1997 figure.*

   Supply

  • Over 827,675 homes in Britain stand empty. Many are in a terrible condition, located in areas of high unemployment, high crime and no amenities. No-one wants to live in these abandoned areas.

   Poor Housing

  • More than 1M children in Britain live in bad housing – the equivalent of the entire populations of Edinburgh, Bath and Manchester put together.*
  • Nearly 1 in 10 children in England lives in overcrowded housing - enough to fill the new Wembley Stadium 10 times over
  • Black and minority ethnic households are 6 times more likely than white households to be overcrowded.*
  • More than 1M homes in Britain are unfit for human habitation - and yet more than 90% of these are occupied.*
  • Of children in bad housing in Britain, 1 in 12 are likely to develop bronchitis, TB, or asthma.*
  • Homeless children living in B&B accommodation are twice as likely to be admitted to A&E with burns and scalding.*
  • Homeless children miss out, on average, on a quarter of their schooling.

*Information courtesy of Shelter