The council's total yearly bill for dealing with homelessness — helping people who have lost their home or are about to. It matters because it is spending on things having already gone wrong, and it has been rising fast across the country, squeezing everything else. A high or fast-rising number means either lots of people in crisis locally or an expensive way of responding — telling those apart needs the caseload numbers too.
| name | homelessness-total |
|---|---|
| dataset | 01-revenue-outturn |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £000 per year |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | data/Revenue_Outturn_time_series_data_v3.2.csv, column `RO4_housgfcfhml_hml_tot_net_cur_exp` |
| period | FY 2020-21 (year_ending 202103) to 2024-25, annual — line starts mid-series |
| missingness | "Not reported before year_ending 202103 — earlier blanks mean the line did not exist yet, not zero spend. Rows with status other than "submitted" (i.e. "total" aggregates and "not submitted") must be filtered out; a non-submitted council-year is a genuine gap, not zero. 2024-25 covers 410/411 councils. Councils abolished/created in 2017-25 reorganisations appear only for the years they existed." |
| score_note | Fast-rising pressure line but demand-driven, series only from 2020-21; unit-cost split needs dataset 06. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Net current cost of the homelessness service, a fast-rising pressure line. For scoring it flags growing failure demand; pair with caseloads from 06-hclic-temporary-accommodation to separate demand from unit cost. Series only begins in 2020-21, so long-run trends cannot use it.