Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of introducing Combined Homelessness and Information Network style reporting systems in city regions outside of London to improve the quality of data on homelessness and rough sleeping.

The Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN) is a multi-agency database recording information about people seen rough sleeping by outreach teams in London.

To introduce a CHAIN style reporting system in city regions outside of London would require all local authorities to have a multi-agency database or to have an outreach team counting the number of rough sleepers in their area every night of the year. However, we do expect all local authorities to regularly gather information and data on rough sleeping in their area.

Our annual snapshot data provides a way of estimating the number of people sleeping rough across England on a single night and allows us to assess change over time. The Rough Sleeping Snapshot statistics are independently verified by Homeless Link and designated as Official Statistics.