This report has been produced by the UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) Homelessness Pilot Team, in collaboration with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), as part of the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) programme. The project linked the Rough Sleeping Questionnaire (RSQ) and National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) to provide unique insights into the relationship between homelessness and rough sleeping and drug and/or alcohol misuse treatment. This report provides the foundation for future work in this area, exhibiting that linking data between these datasets is possible. Moreover, it gives some conclusions which are worth exploring in more depth, such as that for these respondents, substance misuse often came before homelessness for people who didn’t experience homelessness in childhood.

Background - This report focuses on people with experiences of homelessness and rough sleeping who reported having received treatment for substance misuse in England. A linked dataset was created by matching NDTMS (National Drug Treatment Monitoring System) data to the RSQ (Rough Sleeping Questionnaire) data collection, using personal identifiers within the NDTMS and RSQ records. The aim was to assess the relationship between substance misuse treatment outcomes and participants’ history of homelessness and rough sleeping, and the role of the services. In addition, participant’s declarations of substance usage were compared between rough sleeping and substance misuse datasets to assess consistency in reporting