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MORE than nine in 10 deaths of homeless people were in cities and towns in 2017, with only 26 homeless people dying in rural areas, new data has revealed.
Deaths of rough sleepers and those in emergency accommodation in England and Wales rose from 482 in 2013 to 597 in 2017, according to the first Office for National Statistics (ONS) research of its kind in December, which was drawn from local authority estimates.
New data from the ONS, published today, found that 571 of those estimated deaths were in urban local authority regions compared with 26 in rural council areas.
It found the highest estimated number of deaths that year was 21 in Manchester, with 18 recorded in Birmingham and 17 in Bristol and Liverpool.
Lambeth in London had the highest estimate of deaths in the capital at 17, followed by 15 in Camden, 12 in Southwark and 10 in Tower Hamlets.
The ONS said areas with the highest deprivation had about nine times more deaths of homeless people relative to their population than the least disadvantaged areas.
ONS spokesman Ben Humberstone said: “While the worst-affected areas change from one year to the next, the figures show that the deprivation level of an area has a real impact.
“Many more people die homeless in the most deprived areas of England and Wales, and 95 per cent of the deaths are in urban areas rather than rural areas.”
Some 40 per cent of the deaths were attributed to drug poisoning or were alcohol-related, while 10 per cent were due to suicide.
Homeless charity Crisis’s chief executive Jon Sparkes that said central government must ensure that local authorities have the funds to review the death of every person who has died while homeless.
And housing charity Shelter’s chief executive Polly Neate said that the number of deaths should be a “wake-up call” over the “direct consequence of a broken housing system.”
She said: “Unstable and expensive private renting, welfare cuts and a severe lack of social housing are fundamentally at the root of this crisis.
“But we do have the power to fix this. To prevent more people being pushed into homelessness, the government must ensure housing benefit can cover rents and urgently ramp up building social homes.”
