Prince William was 11 when his mother showed him another side of life outside the palace walls. They visited a homeless shelter in London — a formative moment for William, who has long campaigned to raise awareness of the problem.
In a rare interview — his first as the Prince of Wales and his only newspaper interview — he reveals why he has made ending homelessness a lifelong ambition. This month, the prince will launch “a really big project” from his and the Princess of Wales’s Royal Foundation, his first significant intervention as heir to the throne. “It’s nerve-racking,” he says. “But I’m really excited. I’ve been waiting for the right time to do this.”
We sit down to talk at the opening of Reuben House in Peckham, southeast London, an affordable housing development of 33 flats for young people from Centrepoint, the first charity William became patron of in 2005, as his mother once was. He is also patron of another homelessness charity, the Passage, where Diana took him as a child.
How William introduces his children to the problem is on his mind. “When I left this morning, one of the things I was thinking was, ‘When is the right time to bring George or Charlotte or Louis to a homeless organisation?’ I think when I can balance it with their schooling, they will definitely be exposed to it. On the school run, we talk about what we see. When we were in London, driving backwards and forwards, we regularly used to see people sitting outside supermarkets and we’d talk about it.
“I’d say to the children, ‘Why are they there? What’s going on?’ I think it’s in all our interests, it’s the right thing to do, to expose the children, at the right stage, in the right dialogue, so they have an understanding. They [will] grow up knowing that actually, do you know what, some of us are very fortunate, some of us need a little bit of a helping hand, some of us need to do a bit more where we can to help others improve their lives.”
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There is genuine passion and optimism as William, who turns 41 on Wednesday, repeatedly mentions the name of his new five-year project, details of which are under wraps until the end of the month. He is frustrated that government, councils and charities have for too long been “managing” homelessness instead of “preventing” it. “We can do it,” he says. “It’s not insurmountable, this challenge. If anyone does become homeless [we can say], ‘OK, here’s the way back, here’s the pathway’. We can visualise that and we can show people that there is a way to do it.”
For the past few years, his buzzwords for his work on mental health, the environment and homelessness have been “impact” and “relevance”. Today, William is adamant that his new project will have “tangible impact” and provide “living conditions up and down the country that improve people’s lives who need that first rung of the ladder”.
He highlighted the plight of the homeless in 2009 by sleeping rough in Blackfriars, south London, alongside Seyi Obakin, Centrepoint’s chief executive, but wants to go further and “change the narrative”. “There’s a lot of preconceived ideas around homelessness. There’s still stigma, when actually a lot of people don’t understand the fundamental basics,” he says.
“We just see the individual on the streets and go, ‘Oh’. Loads of judgments as to why that person is there. You see more elderly people homeless because that’s what we see on the street. What we don’t see is the youth homelessness — sofa-surfing, people sleeping in their cars or on a mate’s bed. A lot of youth homelessness is very hidden.
“If you actually sit down and hear from young people why they’re in their situation, it’s like a jigsaw. There are so many pieces that have had to come together or fall apart, that meant they’ve ended up where they are.
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“Centrepoint, the Passage and others are pieces that get put back in together. When you put all of them together in one big jigsaw, you suddenly have a picture and you go, ‘OK, I get it now. I know what we need to do’.”
William laughs. “Sorry, I waffle on a bit . . . that is, effectively, a very bad way of explaining what [the project] is about. It’s bringing all the wonderful people and pieces together of the puzzle and allowing the whole country who care about each other to go, ‘Ah, I see what the state of play around homelessness is and I want to help.’ And from that, we can then get other councils in other parts of the country to copy. It’s about that momentum. So you go, ‘Right, we can fix this and we will fix this’.”
He is particularly concerned about rapidly rising youth homelessness. The number of 16 to 24-year-olds who were either homeless or at risk of becoming homeless last year was 122,000, according to Centrepoint’s annual freedom of information requests to all councils. It is a figure that has risen since the charity’s first request five years ago, when it was 110,000. It is due to rise again this year.
Centrepoint’s research shows that breakdown in family relationships is the leading factor, with domestic abuse, evictions and young people leaving the care of local authorities also contributing. “For me, 122,000 is a figure that’s way too high,” William says. “Part of it [his new project] is about preventing rather than managing the problem. We need to get ahead of the curve to stop this becoming more and more fixed.”
William recently met Michael Gove, the housing secretary, and Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to brief them on his plans. Some might wonder why it is the heir to the throne, rather than the government, launching a big homelessness project. “I’m not here to talk about government policy,” he says diplomatically, conscious that the royal family must remain “above politics”. “My plan is an additive to what is already being done.”
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William has previously said he admires Finland’s “housing first” policy, where the homeless are assigned rental homes first, and problems such as mental health and substance abuse are treated afterwards. Since its launch in 2008, Finland’s number of homeless people has fallen by about 30 per cent.
The government’s £150 million Everyone In campaign during the pandemic, when councils moved all those sleeping rough and those at risk of homelessness into accommodation, got William thinking about how to take that kind of “sticking plaster” project further.
“That’s when I started to feel, ‘Hang on, we can go the next level in our plan.’ That’s when we put our tentacles out, consulted the experts, to say, ‘What is it we’re getting wrong here? What is it we could do better collaboratively?’ There’s no point Centrepoint doing its own thing, or the Passage doing one thing and Crisis doing another. You bring them together, and that’s the position I feel I’m in. I can act as an umbrella and go, ‘Right, this is the plan, this is the aim. We’re going to go for it together’.”
With homes at Kensington Palace, Adelaide Cottage in Windsor and Anmer Hall on the King’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk, as well as the run of many other royal residences, William is — by his own admission — “one of the most unlikely advocates for this cause”. In his new role as Prince of Wales, he also controls the Duchy of Cornwall, a 130,000-acre property empire stretching from Cornwall to Kent.
That is a lot of spare bedrooms, and many wonder why he does not give some of them over to the homeless. An eloquent non-answer ensues. I ask again: “So there are no duchy plans yet for affordable housing?” A pause. “There is,” says William. “Absolutely. Social housing. You’ll see that when it’s ready. I’m no policy expert, but I push it where I can.”
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It is a curveball from William that aides were not expecting him to reveal, but it is thought he will “start small” with social housing on his land. If he can demonstrate it is viable, he will scale it up.
William emphasises that “the key thing is making this sustainable” when it comes to his ambitions for homelessness. He adds: “It’s all very well doing big gestures, but there’s no point if . . . there’s no future to it.” He is determined to “make a difference . . . that doesn’t set people up that are homeless for another fall”. “They think they’ve got hope and then you take it away from them, which so many of these people have experienced.”
The monarchy has had a bumpy few years. The death of Queen Elizabeth, the fallout from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s departure to America, and the Duke of York’s antics have dealt hammer blows to the institution. The public may want a few more “big gestures” from its royal family, and William knows this project is a chance to refocus minds on what the monarchy is for.
The feud with his brother has taken up far more airtime than he would wish, and he concedes that not everybody sees the point of the royal family. “We’re all very busy and I think it’s hard sometimes to see what the family bring and what we do,” he says.
“But the amount of causes, the interests, the dinners, the meetings, the visits, whatever it is, that we do day in, day out, throughout the year, we’ve always been involved in that. It’s part of what we do. It’s trying to spotlight other causes, other people, other interests, and help people where we can. We’ll continue to do that.”
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Homelessness came closer to the royal family last week, with the inquest of Malcolm Livingstone, an RAF veteran who served as Queen Elizabeth’s footman and as a pallbearer for Diana’s coffin when it was returned from Paris in 1997. Livingstone was left homeless while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism when he returned from the Iraq War.
He died, aged 44, in November 2021, in the grounds of a church next to a shelter in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, which he had approached twice for a bed. William has read the coverage the morning we meet. “I didn’t know him, but the story is very tragic and very sad. That’s exactly why I’m working with Seyi and all these brilliant people — they know what they’re doing, they just need a bit more collaboration and for homelessness to be in a different light.”
Surrounded by reporters and cameras on every public engagement, I wonder whether William is ever able to walk the streets incognito and encounter the homeless there, rather than in a controlled environment like today. “Totally,” he says. And does he give them cash? “I don’t tend to give money. I tend to buy them a drink, food, something like that. I find that when I’m walking around or driving past and see other people do it [give money], people don’t even look at them. How many people stop and talk to somebody who is homeless? Very few of us.
“In my job, I get to meet these people, I get to hear the stories, I get to feel it, I get to see it. That for me — and I’ve heard from them themselves — matters an awful lot. They’ve become invisible. It’s really important that society acknowledges that there is somebody there and they’re having a tough time. It shouldn’t happen but it’s right there. You can’t ignore it.”
William knows that cameraphones sometimes capture him during his downtime, but says: “I try and do these things subtly, when there’s no media and no one else knows about it.” He tried — and failed — to go under the radar in London last year, selling copies of The Big Issue. He was wearing jeans, trainers, a baseball cap and a red tabard, with no media in tow, but was soon recognised by passers-by.
“It’s very hard to make it not about me — [that’s] what I don’t want to do. That was about promoting homelessness. If you’re doing to go and do genuine gestures, you do them privately, you don’t do them with an audience.”
Diana regularly bought The Big Issue, which since 1991 has supported more than 107,000 marginalised people to earn more than £150 million. Its founder, Lord Bird, who slept rough in his youth, says of William: “He lifted us, in the same way his mother lifted us in the earlier stages. Monarchy doesn’t necessarily rock my boat, but irrespective of what you do and where you come from, I want to know what you can do to help me dismantle poverty. So it was really good. I would like to see William be more useful than royalty has been so far. From what I see, I think he could be just the guy.”
Mick Clarke, chief executive of the Passage, says William “does an awful lot where there aren’t cameras”. “That’s what he enjoys the most, because he’s meeting real people, hearing real stories, it’s what has formulated his plans. When he comes here, nothing’s sugar-coated, nothing is sanitised. People on the streets are very good about knowing whether someone is authentic or not within a second. He is very authentic.”
During the pandemic, Clarke revealed, a masked-up, socially distanced William made three visits to the Passage in November 2020, meeting residents and preparing meals for the charity’s emergency food hub that delivered meals to homeless people. “He’d be making the food with the volunteers, chopping the carrots, boxing the food up into containers, washing up, and in one case he actually delivered the food to one of the hotels in Westminster. They got a surprise when they saw their delivery man.”
Obakin agrees the future king’s involvement is “powerful”, laughing when he recalls how William fared “much better than me” when they “kipped down” together on a freezing December night 14 years ago. Afterwards, as they walked from Blackfriars to the Centrepoint service in Soho at dawn, Obakin asked William about the experience: “He said it was very uncomfortable, but it was only one night and what worried him the most was the mental state of a young person who had to do that every night, who doesn’t know what the next day is going to be like.
“People have been tireless in their efforts to tackle homelessness. The problem is, no matter how hard we try, the situation remains challenging because it’s like trying to plug a broken dam with a few twigs, without the co-ordination and support of society at large. That’s what it means to have him. That ability that he has to convince society to think about the issue in a different way — to not think about it as just rough sleepers and think about homelessness in the round.
“He can draw other support to the cause that ordinarily would not be there, from people who might say, ‘If he’s involved, if he’s interested, actually I might pay some attention to this stuff too’. That’s what he can do. He can’t do politics, but he can do human.”
