Prince William urges tech industry to help prevent homelessness

At London Tech Week, HRH Prince William joined top industry leaders to talk about how businesses can utilise data and technology to help prevent homelessness.

Thousands of people across the UK face homelessness every year, but the warning signs often appear long before crisis point.

The Prince of Wales’s Homewards programme has launched the Homelessness Data Lab, a first-of-its-kind national collaboration designed to improve how data and technology are used to prevent homelessness.

The Homelessness Data Lab, delivered in partnership with LandAid and Salesforce, will demonstrate how the tools already used in modern business can be applied ethically and responsibly to identify people at risk of homelessness at its earliest stages, when support can have the greatest impact.

Bringing together over 25 organisations across business, technology, government, local authorities, and frontline services, the Lab will explore innovative and practical prevention solutions, which will be piloted across the six flagship Homewards locations.

Members of the Homelessness Data Lab include Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture, and NatWest Group, who will develop time-bound, practical projects focused on improving coordination between frontline services; reducing response times; developing a better understanding of why people experience homelessness; and better signposting support to people at the first signs of struggle. These projects will aim to demonstrate that homelessness can be predictable, and therefore preventable.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO, Salesforce UK & Ireland, said: “Our work with Prince William’s Homewards programme and the launch of the Homelessness Data Lab represents a definitive shift in how society can tackle its most complex challenges. Over 430,000 people across the UK are currently facing homelessness – but this isn’t inevitable. Homelessness is rarely random; it can be predictable, which means with the right tools and support, it can be preventable.

“By bringing together more than 25 organisations across the private, public, and non-profit sectors, the Data Lab allows us to put data and technology to work safely and ethically where it is needed most. At Salesforce, we believe business is one of the greatest platforms for change, and we are proud to contribute our technology and expertise to empower frontline services, identify risk earlier, and help make homelessness rare, brief, and unrepeated.”

Homewards was launched in 2023 and works across six locations in the UK, including Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Lambeth, Newport, Northern Ireland, and Sheffield. Since launch, Homewards has worked to engage a wide range of organisations, including those outside the traditional homelessness sector, demonstrating that prevention requires action across all levels of society.

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Its goal is to show that homelessness can be made rare, brief, and unrepeated if we all play our part.

As HRH Prince William said during the panel: “So many people interact with data on a day-to-day basis, so many of your customers, your clients, will be using data through banks, through the phones, that I’m not sure you realise how much of that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before the action arrives.

“The earlier upstream you deal with the problem, the better. As we all know, in life, prevention is better than the cure.”