Guidance

Homelessness Prevention Grant 2022 to 2023: technical note

Updated 4 December 2022

Applies to England

Homelessness Prevention Grant

The £315.8 million Homelessness Prevention Grant for the 2022-23 financial year represents an increase of £5.8 million on the 2021-22 allocation.

The additional £5.8m has been included to meet the new burdens following the expansion of priority need to those who are homeless as a result of domestic abuse, which came into force in July 2021 following the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021. We have assessed £5.8m as the total cost of meeting the new burdens associated with this change in 2022-23.

The purpose of the Homelessness Prevention Grant is to give local authorities control and flexibility in managing homelessness pressures and supporting those who are at risk of homelessness. We expect local authorities to use it to deliver the following priorities:

• To fully enforce the Homelessness Reduction Act and contribute to ending rough sleeping by increasing activity to prevent single homelessness
• Reduce family temporary accommodation numbers through maximising family homelessness prevention
• Eliminate the use of unsuitable bed and breakfast accommodation for families for longer than the statutory 6-week limit

This document provides a technical description of how we calculated the allocations for the Homelessness Prevention Grant. We consider the allocations in two stages:

1. The first stage considers the allocation of the £310m, which reflects the value of grants awarded in 2022-23. This is made up of £263m in previous grants that were combined in 2021-22, as well as the £47m new funding that was introduced in 2021-22.
2. The second stage considers the allocation of an additional £5.8m for the 2022-23 financial year, to fund new burdens following the implementation of the changes in the Domestic Abuse Act.

1. Initial £310m

The first £310m is allocated in the same way as in the 2021-22 financial year, and uses the same approach as outlined in the Homelessness Prevention Grant 2021-22 technical note.

Missing data – initial £263m

For West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire, the 2022-23 allocations are calculated using the sum of the local authorities that have merged to form them (for a full list of local authority mergers, see below).

Missing data – additional £47m

Variable A – housing benefit claimants

We do not have a total number of housing benefit claimants for West Northamptonshire or North Northamptonshire. We estimate the total housing benefit claimants using the values for the local authorities that merged to form them (for a full list of local authority mergers, see below).

Variable B – lower quartile rents

We do not have rent data for West Northamptonshire or North Northamptonshire. We estimate rents in these local authorities using a weighted average of rents across the local authorities that merged to create them (for the full list of local authority mergers, see below).

Weights are based on the total number of homelessness prevention and relief duties owed in 2018/19. See homelessness live tables data.

Variable C

We do not have data on an area cost adjustment for West Northamptonshire or North Northamptonshire. For these areas we use the average of the area cost adjustments for the local authorities that have combined to form them (for a full list of local authority mergers, see below).

2. Additional £5.8m

The additional £5.8m funding has been allocated to meet the costs of new burdens following the expansion of priority need to those who are homeless as a result of domestic abuse, which came into force in July 2021 following the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021.

The additional £5.8m is allocated using the same formula as the £47m uplift in Homelessness Prevention Grant funding in 2021-22, and makes use of the same methodology as outlined in section 3 of the 2021-22 Homelessness Prevention Grant technical note.

We have used the same data points as for the 2021-22 Homelessness Prevention Grant allocations. More recent data has been skewed by the impact of the pandemic and we considered the previous data set is a better reflection of the distribution of homelessness pressures.

Local authority mergers

West Northamptonshire

• Daventry
• South Northamptonshire
• Northampton

North Northamptonshire

• Corby
• East Northamptonshire
• Kettering
• Wellingborough