Prince William is launching a major five-year campaign to end homelessness, which he says should not exist in a “modern and progressive society”.
The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation invests £3m in seed funding to make homelessness ‘rare, brief and non-recurring’.
Six sites across the UK will be used to test ideas to reduce homelessness.
“Everyone should have a safe and secure home and be treated with dignity,” says Prince William.
This ‘Homewards’ initiative is likely to be one of the defining projects for the Prince of Wales – a commitment that he will know comes with the risk of being accused of policy drift.
Ahead of the launch, Prince William spoke to Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer, Advancement Secretary Michael Gove and the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales.
It is a cause that is deeply personal to the prince, which he attributes to the influence of his mother, Princess Diana, who brought him to homeless charities as a child.
There are currently more than 300,000 homeless people in the UK, including people staying in hostels and temporary accommodation, living in cars and couch surfing, as well as people sleeping rough.
As well as preventing homelessness, it aims to change attitudes and show how many people can be affected. The prince recently opened an affordable housing project for young people in work but who still need help with housing.
Prince William’s plan is to bring together local coalitions of housing experts, charities and private industry to develop housing projects and support services, targeting different ways in which homelessness occurs, whether in big cities or coastal towns.
This month, Prince William visited an affordable housing project in London for people who are working or studying
He will be on a two-day tour of the UK, unveiling locations for the initiative, which is supported by charities such as Shelter, Centrepoint, Crisis and The Passage.
A media briefing was told that success will be measured in terms of reducing homelessness in those places – and finding approaches that can be replicated elsewhere.
It also draws international inspiration from Finland, considered a model for reducing homelessness to very low levels.
The campaign published an Ipsos opinion poll of more than 3,000 UK adults suggesting the level of public concern and support for the intervention.
- 85% believe that homelessness is a very or fairly serious problem
- 72% believe homelessness has worsened in the past year
- 73% believe that ending homelessness is not getting enough attention
- 22% have had personal experience of homelessness, whether themselves, family or friends
But Prince William will also face challenges about how someone with such wealth and vast estates could make such calls about homelessness.
“The last thing we need is for William to step into this problem, a man who has three huge houses and a huge estate gifted to him by the state,” said Graham Smith of the anti-monarchy group, Republic.
He says homelessness is about government policy and investment and will not be “solved by charity or royal patronage”, accusing Prince William of being a “hypocrite”.
But a Kensington Palace spokesman said the prince was using his public platform to make a positive difference.
“This is not a PR stunt. It’s about trying to change the way we as a society think about homelessness,” the spokesperson said.
Matt Downey, chief executive of the charity Crisis, said he had personally spoken to the Prince of Wales about the project and confirmed the authenticity of his commitment.
“People who experience homelessness can smell when someone is not authentic. I can certainly see the difference between people who want to band together for PR purposes on this issue and people who are genuinely driven to right one of society’s wrongs, and I saw that deep there,” Mr Downey said.
Royal author and academic Prof Pauline McLaren said such an activist approach was likely to appeal to the younger generation, who were more likely to question the value of the monarchy.
But she said the prince would need to be seen to make a personal contribution. His royal foundation is providing £500,000 of seed funding at each of six regional centers for the project, but there has so far been no confirmation of earlier reports of social housing plans for his estate in the Duchy of Cornwall.
Historian Sir Anthony Selden said Prince William’s initiative showed how royal interventions could look beyond short-term political cycles to wider issues such as “the mental health and well-being of the population, the physical and built environment and the economic condition of the people”.
But he said it meant the prince was “right in the space usually reserved for elected politicians”.
Political parties are already arguing over the response to rising mortgage and rent costs and the lack of affordable housing.
Cllr Darren Rodwell, the Local Government Association’s housing spokesman, said councils fear a “national homelessness crisis” – and there are 1.2 million people on council housing waiting lists in England.
He said there was a perfect storm of “dwindling housing stock and an unaffordable and overly competitive private rental market” and tenants facing eviction – and he called for councils to be able to build 100,000 new social rented homes every year.
But Prince William said he was confident in the ambition to fundamentally reduce homelessness.
“I want to make this a reality and over the next five years give people in the UK hope that homelessness can be prevented when we work together,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Upgrading, Housing and Communities welcomed the prince’s initiative.
“We’re giving councils £2 billion over three years to help them tackle homelessness and rough sleeping, targeting areas where it’s most needed,” she said.