ONS may stop publishing mortality data on homeless people

Charities say move is ‘deeply concerning’, while Office for National Statistics claims data was not accurate enough

An official count of the deaths of homeless people would no longer be published in England and Wales under proposals to increase the efficiency of health data that campaigners have called “callous”.

In a move that advocates for homeless people fear will increase the invisibility of the most vulnerable and amount to sweeping the problem under the rug, the Office for National Statistics is consulting on dropping the annual bulletin, which showed an estimated 741 deaths among homeless people in 2021.