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.
In talking about the potential impacts of this, Prince William emphasised the link between mental health crisis and homelessness: "The mental health toll on repeat homelessness is huge," he said. If these crises happen repeatedly without intervention, the impact on the individual and the entire society is huge.
Salesforce's Bahrololoumi specifically connected this to the benefit for frontline staff.
If emergency and healthcare workers can intervene before things escalate to a higher level, this makes the overall effort easier.
“We also need to reduce the administrative burden on frontline staff, so they can get out and help people,” Bahrololoumi added.
In order to inform how it is best for frontline workers to intervene, Gibbs explained that it should be a geographically specific approach. “Each city has to understand their own population dynamics," she said. "You [then] have to put the data tools in the hands of the frontline staff, so they can do something about it."
Prince William reinforced this, giving the example that, “what is causing homelessness in Aberdeen is not what is causing it in Northern Ireland”.
Measures like the NHS's Mental Health Crisis Assessment Service, discussed at this year's Design in Mental Health conference, are looking to address the mental health capacities in the UK.
Resources like this being used efficienctly through data could hugely benefit from interventions resulting from the Homewards Homelessness Data Lab.