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Since counting began in 2017, the number of people who die while homeless each year has more than doubled. Despite this, the urgent need to prevent homeless deaths has been absent from successive national strategies until the National Plan to End Homelessness of 2025.As it stands, the only record of homeless deaths in the UK is the Dying Homeless Project conducted by the Museum of Homelessness.At the same time, concerns relating to homelessness are increasingly being raised by coroners. Where a coroner identifies risks to the lives of others, they have a duty to send a Prevention of Future Deaths report (PFD) to organisations and individuals with the authority to take action.At a local level, although PFDs and SARs occasionally reference each other, our research and practice within these systems tells a story of inconsistent and unclear relationships between coroners and Safeguarding Adults Boards.Between 2017-21, an annual average of 3.6 PFDs relating to homeless individuals were written and in almost all cases, their homelessness was peripheral to the issues raised.By contrast, in 2023-2025, 38 reports were sent – an average of 12.67 per annum – and, in the majority of these, homelessness and housing insecurity were central concerns.An example comes from coroners in Manchester South (2024) and Cornwall (2025), where three reports referenced the shortage of social housing as a key concern.Notably, concerns were not addressed to the local authority responsible for the delivery of statutory housing and homelessness duties, but instead to a central government department, indicating housing insecurity as a public health issue with potentially life-threatening consequences that require national attention.All too often, homeless deaths are viewed as single incidents, not as connected instances of systemic injustice.If implemented, a NOM will need to have clear connections to the findings from Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs), required where an adult with social care needs, who was at risk of abuse or neglect, has died.In recent years, notably since 2019, Safeguarding Adults Boards have paid increasing attention to homelessness in SARs and by supporting the development and implementation of discrete Homelessness Fatality Reviews.Although SARs are published and there is local governance of the implementation of learning, there is no national oversight or routine statutory country-wide analysis. However, a recent national analysis (Second national analysis of Safeguarding Adult Reviews: April 2019-March 2023) did give discrete attention to homelessness and identified the value of SARs looking beyond the local.At a local level, although PFDs and SARs occasionally reference each other, our research and practice within these systems tells a story of inconsistent and unclear relationships between coroners and Safeguarding Adults Boards.Local areas adopt varying working arrangements and there are no formal opportunities to collaborate on the identification or implementation of learning or on the escalation of concerns to central government.However, the introduction of a NOM would be an opportunity to integrate and improve systems governing the process of review and learning following the deaths of excluded or marginalised people. We also hope it might focus attention on ways to ensure the experience for bereaved people is more responsive, coherent and sensitive, as currently they are often required to navigate their involvement in different processes in parallel with little sense of impact and outcome.The proposals for a NOM also raise a further consideration, as questions of scale will be vitally important in the new system: to what extent is an issue a national or locally specific issue, and who decides?At present, in both the SAR and inquest process these are questions left to coroners and SAR authors. Therefore – at the very least – access to transparent and coherently organised data via a NOM might be helpful in improving consistency nationally as well as providing individual coroners and SAR authors with information about the prevalence of their concerns.We believe it could significantly improve the systems we rely on to investigate deaths, and – most importantly – begin to prevent the deaths of people experiencing homelessness.Gill Taylor is strategic lead for the Dying Homeless Project at the Museum of Homelessness and a Safeguarding Adults Review author. Edward Kirton-Darling is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol Law School. His research relating to the deaths of people experiencing homelessness or in precarious housing is available at https://homelessinquests.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/

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HOMELESSNESS

Death prevention duties

By Edward Kirton-Darling, Gill Taylor | 29 April 2026

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