Prince William reveals how Diana made him see the world a different way

The Prince of Wales is opening up about how his late mother has inspired his work with homelessness in a brand-new documentary.

In a preview clip of the upcoming ‘Prince William: We Can End Homelessness’, the royal talks about how Diana, Princess of Wales used to bring him and his younger brother to The Passage, a homelessness charity that William maintains a patronage of, when they were younger.

“My mother took me to The Passage. She took Harry and I both there. I must have been about 11, I think, probably, at the time. Maybe 10. I’d never been to anything like that before. And I was a bit anxious as to what to expect,” he says in the documentary.

Diana, he says, “went about her usual part of making everyone feel relaxed, and having a laugh and joking with everyone,” while he was left thinking that despite the fact that the people they were visiting had no home, “it was incredible how happy an environment it was.”

“That’s when it dawned on me that there are other people out there who don’t have the same life as you do,” he says.

It was his mother’s approach to showing her sons about the issues facing people outside the palace wall that inspired him to make it a cornerstone of his royal duties, and now he says he talks about homelessness with his own children on the school run.

 In the documentary, William says that “I feel compelled to act, because I don’t want to just talk about it. I don’t want to just listen. I actually want to see someone smile because their life has been made better.”

‘Prince William: We Can End Homelessness’ was filmed over a 12-month period to document the first year of the royal’s Homewards UK initiative, which aims to make homelessness rare, brief and unrepeated.

The programme airs on ITV on 30 and 31 October.