Prince William was joined by four other panellists in a recent discussion about his Homewards programme at London Tech Week, which coincided with the launch of the Homewards Homelessness Data Lab.
Launched originally in 2023, Homewards is a locally-led programme launched by Prince William and The Royal Foundation to end homelessness, making it "rare, brief, and unrepeated". Now, in 2026, the team is launching its data lab to attempt to improve its efforts.
The new data lab aims to bring together organisations from across sectors to test how data can be used responsibly and ethically to spot homelessness risk earlier and respond more quickly.
As the founder, Prince William was joined for the discussion by broadcaster Jake Humphrey; Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE, President and CEO of Salesforce UK & Ireland; Solange Chamberlain, CEO of Retail Banking at NatWest Group; and Linda Gibbs, Principal at Bloomberg Associates.
Bahrololoumi remarked that “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.”
The discussion centred on how this anonymised data, banking metrics, and digital records can ethically and responsibly identify the early warning signs of homelessness before a crisis hits. The panel gave the examples of missed rent, financial drops, etc.
We need to reduce the administrative burden on frontline staff, so they can get out and help people
Knowing these, the "Homewards Homelessness Data Lab" was the key to this, but the entire pointed out how it will hinge on the trust the target users have in the system. Transparency therefore was of huge importance.
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