Tackling Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Conference 2026

In March 2025, there were an estimated 7,718 people sleeping rough over the month. This is a 3% increase since last quarter (December 2024) and increased by 5% compared to last year (March 2024). This reverses the progress won through the pandemic 'Everyone In' response and leaves the UK with the highest homelessness rate in the developed world (124 households per 10,000 without a stable home).

With homelessness being downstream from the wider housing crisis, this conference will address both how funding can be deployed to assist in long term solutions as well as in the near term.

The Government's Resposne:

The Government’s Spending Review 2025 aims to alleviate the ongoing housing & homelessness crisis with arguably the largest housing focused investment package in a generation:

• £39 billion, 10‑year Affordable Homes Programme to expand social‑rent supply and relieve private‑rent pressure

• £100 million Prevention of Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Fund (within the £3.25 billion Transformation Fund) to scale early intervention models

• £950 million for Local Authority Housing Fund (Round 4) so councils can create quality temporary accommodation and exit costly hotels/B&Bs

• Consolidation of single‑homelessness grants into a streamlined Rough Sleeping Prevention & Recovery Grant from 2026‑27, protecting existing revenue budgets.

The challenges:

Average private rents hit £1,332 a month in March 2025, up 7.7 % year-on-year and rising fastest in the lower-cost regions that once acted as a safety valve. Combined with the freeze in Local Housing Allowance, many households are one price hike away from the streets.

Rough sleeping is now truly national in nature. London and the South East still host 45 % of all rough sleepers, but Yorkshire & Humber saw the sharpest jump last year (+43 %), while only one English region recorded a fall. Local counts show a steady increase in women, young adults and newly arrived migrants are among those sleeping rough, signalling gaps in both prevention and integration services.

Temporary accommodation has become an expensive crutch for councils to lean on. 131,140 households were in temporary accommodation on the 31st March  2025, up 11.8% compared with Q1 2024, including 169,050 dependent children.

Councils spent £2.1 billion on temporary housing in 2023-24, six times the amount a decade earlier, for some local authorities, this now swallows almost half of the core budget, crowding out education, social care, and crucially building & regeneration.

This Conference will prime you and your team to:

• Align local homelessness strategies with the new Affordable Homes pipeline

• Deploy Transformation‑Fund prevention money before crisis costs escalate

• Re‑engineer temporary accommodation portfolios to meet cost

• Discover new ways of partnering across the public, charity, and private sector

We have partially and fully funded passes available – contact us today to discuss bringing your team: oliver@policybriefmedia.co.uk

We have partially and fully funded passes available – contact us today to discuss bringing your team: oliver@policybriefmedia.co.uk