United Kingdom, Rural

Homelessness in the United Kingdom is generally assumed to be an urban phenomenon, dominated by the sites and sights of on-street homeless people in inner cities. Such a focus not only neglects more hidden aspects of urban homelessness but also fuels the broad presumption that homelessness does not exist in rural areas. Rurality in the United Kingdom encompasses a complex configuration of spaces, ranging from pressured extended suburbs through farming regions to the more remote peripheries. Together these spaces often constitute an object of desire for city dwellers; they are places to visit and perhaps to move out to. Rural places thus take on an imagined character as happy, healthy, problem-free regions—certainly not the focus of significant social problems. Homelessness in rural areas is therefore very much a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Two major studies, one by Christine Lambert and colleagues in 1992 and one by Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, and Rebekah Widdowfield between 1999 and 2001, have sought to provide research evidence for the existence and nature of rural homelessness in the United Kingdom. Such research is hampered by inadequate statistical data on this issue, data restricted to on-street counts of “rough sleepers,” and local authorities' records of households they judge to be homeless and in “priority need” under the 1996 Housing Act. Rough sleeper counts are carried out in larger urban centers and provide no data for rural areas where, in any case, homelessness seldom takes the form of countable “roofless” people on the street. Local authority data are more useful in rural settings, although it is broadly accepted that they undercount homeless populations. They exclude households that do not report their homeless condition to the local authority, and also those who may be homeless but are not perceived as having a high-priority need—such as young single people and childless couples.

The study by Lambert et al. calculated that in 1989–1990, 14,590 households were recorded as homeless and in priority need by English local authorities in rural areas, this representing some 12 percent of the homeless total for England in that year. Moreover, rates of homelessness were found to be growing faster in rural areas than elsewhere—a trend that was confirmed in an update of the study in 1994. The study by Cloke et al. analyzed similar data for 1996–1997, finding that the overall level of homelessness in rural England was 35 per 10,000 households. While this figure represents a higher rate than that recorded by official statistics in the United States, it remains below the corresponding levels for urban areas of England (57 per 10,000). Nevertheless, some 16,000 households were accepted by rural local authorities as being in situations of “priority homelessness,” a figure that represents 14.4 percent of the total for England. Not only had the levels of rural homelessness increased proportionately during the 1990s, but in the so-called deep rural areas homelessness had risen in absolute terms by 12 percent, while it had fallen in London by 27 percent and in urban areas more generally by 18 percent.

...