During an impassioned plea at London Tech Week, the Prince of Wales has urged big tech companies to join in the fight to end homelessness through his Homewards project
Prince William has urged the tech world to join forces and help him in the fight against homelessness. The Prince of Wales lauded plans to use AI and data to tackle homelessness as “game-changing” as he made an impassioned plea for tech firms to get involved to solve the problem.
William’s Homewards project, which aims to make homelessness rare, brief and unrepeated for those affected, has partnered with London Tech Week to bring technology from the private sector with charitable organisations. On Wednesday, the project launched a “Data Lab” to identify ways in which tech companies can help to prevent homelessness.
Speaking in the AI Arena at the conference centre in Kensington Olympia, William, 43, told delegates that the figure of 430,000 homeless people in the UK was “four times the size of Wembley stadium”.
In a panel discussion on stage, he said: “Many of your customers, your clients, will be using data through banking apps, through their phones. I’m not sure you realise how much that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before they actually arise, so that’s why I think today is so important that we get that conversation started.”
William, who said that Homewards was starting to get to the “meaty” stage of the project three years after it was launched, told the audience: “Homelessness is not inevitable. It’s entirely preventable. You guys in this room, the tech world is a huge part of this puzzle.”
Speaking about the six pilot locations for his Homewards project, he said that “what’s causing homelessness in Aberdeen is not what’s causing homelessness in Bournemouth” and “what’s happening in Northern Ireland is not what’s happening in Sheffield” but “there are threads through all of that”.
He said: “Prevention is better than a cure and you guys have got those answers”. William convened a panel hosted by Jeff Humphrey, an entrepreneur and podcaster, who told the audience: “ Prince William spoke passionately about the need for support for people.”
Seated along from William, Linda Gibbs, principal of Bloomberg Associates, spoke about the ways in which data had been successfully deployed to prevent homelessness in the US, citing a project in LA where a red flag had been raised by someone who had failed to collect their benefits while simultaneously taking custody of their grandchildren. It led to the person being offered help to reinstate their benefit payments.
Speaking about the “Data Lab” which has been launched by Homewards, panel member Zahra Bahrololoumi, president and CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, said that it was important for the data to be used within “legal and ethical guidelines”.
She added: “The Lab has the expertise to make sure that the data is used appropriately and responsibly and that’s hugely important to preserve the dignity of human beings.”
Meanwhile, Solange Chamberlain, CEO of retail banking at NatWest, explained how the bank had started to offer an option for customers to disclose that they had no permanent address.
Visiting the Homewards stand in the conference centre following the panel discussion, William spun a large wheel on the wall which showed the different ways in which homelessness could be prevented. It landed on “predictions”, which can be made about potential homelessness risks through data analysis.
The prince was shown a computer system where banking data from 5.4million unidentified Natwest customers has been combined with the latest census information to pinpoint areas in Scotland where people were more at risk of homelessness.
Tim Siret, Insights analyst at Smart Data Foundry, the non-profit project attached to the University of Edinburgh, showed the prince how his team had created a searchable map using the data to analyse risk areas for homelessness in Scotland.
William said: “So, it’s game-changing stuff. It looks fantastic.” The prince described it as “amazing” and asked: “How do we take that data and identify that most clearly?”
William said that he was “excited” by the potential of using data to solve homelessness. He added: “I think also knowing what to do with that data afterwards is really important. Thank you, it’s really good It’s exciting.”
Chris Parker, founder of Ask:Enact, then showed William a pilot computer system which uses AI to provide frontline police and NHS staff with up-to-date information about the latest legislation on the ground, such as providing safeguarding details if a 16-year-old was to be stopped by the police.
Thinking about ways in which the same template could be deployed across the rest of the UK, William asked: “How do we make what you’ve done here scalable?”
Speaking after the royal visit, Hazel Detsiny, who has been executive director of Homewards since September 2025, said: “The key is that we’ve got to get businesses of all sorts to take responsibility and get in on this as well as the public sector and the third sector, because they’ve got the jobs, they’ve got the tech.
“We’re not fundraisers, we’re not trying to compete with the homelessness charities. We’ve got to be the shoulders for the under charities to stand on.”
