GREEN PASTURES
Housing the homeless and poor
without discrimination or favour

Statistics

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 50 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.*

  • In 2007 1.6 million households were on social housing waiting lists. 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.

Updated 14th September 2008

*Information courtesy of Shelter