Overview
- Homewards, Salesforce and LandAid announced the Homelessness Data Lab on Wednesday at London Tech Week with more than 25 partners from banks, telcos, tech firms, government and charities.
- The Lab will run short, practical experiments across Homewards’ six flagship areas to test whether data signals can predict who is at risk of losing a home and trigger timely support.
- Salesforce is supplying technology and expertise and partners have shown demonstrations such as an anonymised NatWest banking-data map layered with census information to identify higher-risk areas in Scotland.
- Organisers say they will formalise strong legal and ethical data‑governance rules before wider roll-out and will rely on anonymisation, consent where needed, and clear limits on how personal data are used.
- The project responds to a long-running data gap and rising homelessness — roughly 430,000 people cited in coverage — and its immediate next steps are running trials, proving interventions at the frontline, and planning national scaling if pilots work.