Homelessness and people with learning disabilities: what do we know?
Prompted by a series of tweets from @CommCats about meeting a woman with Down’s syndrome sleeping rough on a London street after falling behind with the rent on her flat, and a question from @alexsharedlives asking if I knew any statistics about people with learning disabilities who are homeless, I promised to have a dig around and see what I could find. Rather than a tweet bombardment, I thought it would be better to put this into a quick blog, but most of these statistics are new to me so I would be grateful to hear if I’ve got anything wrong or missed out any useful sources of information. Social services statistics To start with, I looked at the local authority statistics on the types of accommodation that adults with learning disabilities are living in. There are some massive limitations to this as a source of information on homelessness: 1) It’s only for adults aged 18-64 years old; 2) Up to 2013/14 this was only for adults with learning disabilities known to (i.e. recognised as ...