The Prince of Wales made an emotional speech at London Tech Week on Wednesday, declaring, "We can stop all that pain" as he praised the power of technology to identify those at risk of homelessness. Speaking at Olympia London, Prince William emphasised that "prevention is better than the cure" in the fight against homelessness, and that technology can be used to "keep people in their homes."
Homewards Homelessness Data Lab Launch
His speech coincided with the launch of the Homelessness Data Lab by his homelessness initiative, Homewards. This national collaboration aims to improve the use of data and technology to prevent homelessness. Prince William launched Homewards in 2022 as a five-year programme designed to demonstrate that it is possible to end homelessness by making it "rare, brief, and unrepeated."
Focus Areas and Partnerships
The initiative focuses on six target areas across the UK: Lambeth, Bournemouth, Newport, Belfast, Aberdeen, and Sheffield. Each area places a special emphasis on certain groups, ranging from single mothers to those leaving the care system. The Homelessness Data Lab is partnered with major businesses such as Bloomberg, Vodafone Three, and the NatWest Group, which are working on projects to enhance coordination between frontline services.
During his first appearance at London Tech Week, Prince William addressed a packed conference hall, stating: "As we all know, in life prevention is better than the cure, and so with the data and the technology we can deploy, being able to keep people in their homes, their jobs, their communities, families, at school, that is inherently much better than if we then deal with problems once they become homeless."
He added: "The damage that someone goes through to get to that place is inevitable, sometimes almost very, very difficult to bring them back in, so if we can stop all that pain, that damage getting done, and that surely is a much better way of doing that."
Expert Insights
Zahra Bahrololoumi, chief executive of Salesforce UK and Ireland, a cloud-based customer relationship management platform and official Homewards supporter, joined Prince William on stage. Her company is supporting the lab with its expertise, and she stressed that information held on individuals would be used "appropriately and responsibly."
She explained: "The lab will now run a series of very short chart-focused experiments, tests, exploration around this data, because if we can make (homelessness) predictable, we can prevent it, so it's really to understand the causes. There's such a rich set of data, there's years and years' worth of anonymised data from people that have presented themselves as homeless that we can really explore and mine."
