Prince William, heir to the throne, resident of multiple palaces, and a man who reportedly has around 60 servants, told London Tech Week that technology could spot the warning signs of homelessness before it happens. He suggested that banks, phone apps, and customer data could be used to “see problems with potential homelessness before they actually arise.”
Never mind that the man himself has cut off public access to parks for privacy, flies in helicopters for fun, and has never had to check his bank account before buying a train ticket. His solution to the housing crisis? Surveillance. Surveillance is his answer. Not a living wage, affordable housing, or mental health support.
Prince William has told the tech industry that homelessness rarely happens without warning — and technology could help to solve the issue.
The prince told London Tech Week that data, technology and businesses could spot the warning signs of homelessness early and prevent homelessness before it occurs.
“Many of your customers, your clients, will be using data through banking apps, through their phones,” he told the tech conference. “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.”
Homewards, the prince’s homelessness programme, is launching the Homelessness Data Lab, which will employ techniques currently used by businesses to “ethically and responsibly” identify people at risk of homelessness at its earliest stages.
Sky News
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Algorithms Cannot Replace Affordable Housing
William’s homelessness project now looks less like a serious solution and more like an exercise in passing the buck. Instead of confronting the hard, material causes of homelessness, low wages, unaffordable housing, weak tenant protections, mental health cuts and the cost of living, he is talking about algorithms, banking apps and customer data “predicting” who might lose their home.
That may sound clever at a tech conference, but for people living on the edge, it raises serious questions about privacy, consent and surveillance. The last thing someone facing homelessness needs is another institution monitoring their bank account and calling it compassion.
The optics are grim. William lives with access to multiple royal residences, a reported 60-strong household workforce, costly renovations, and royal travel arrangements most working people could never imagine. This is also the man whose family’s move to Forest Lodge has sparked anger over reduced public access to parts of Windsor Great Park. And now he wants to lecture the public on how homelessness can be solved through data.
He should start with the basics. Build affordable homes, support living wages, fund mental health services, back childcare and strengthen tenant protections. Push for transparency around royal wealth, land, tax arrangements and the housing power held by institutions like the Duchy.
Instead, William appears to be offering tech language in place of structural change. The palace will get the photo op. The friendly press will call it visionary. He will sit down, smile for the cameras and move on. But homelessness will not be solved by data-mining vulnerable people. It will be solved by money, housing, policy and political will.
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How is data going to solve homelessness if you’re employer goes bankrupt without notice to you or if you’re renting and you’re given a month notice because your landlord wants to sell up and the rental in your area doesn’t match up with yours wages??? I swear to god that man and the people advising him are not living in the reality of the masses and what is really going on in the real world, today. Their reality is from a wealthy and out of touch points of view that every day people having got the luxury of living. How could he understood the reality of people working long hours and still having to go to food banks ,living if credit or going to borrow from loan sharks just to put food on the table,when his reality is deciding that his last three or four forever home is not it and deciding to move on to the next with the taxpayers paying for whatever renovations he wants on the property??? I stopped reading the uk news for most of my life and for my sanity, maybe I should go back to being unaware of all the nonsense spouting by these privileged parasites.