Homeless: Number of Rough Sleepers Soars.

It is, as many have stated, including this Blog, impossible to ignore that more and more people are homeless.

Homeless people with backpacks, small groups on the streets at night, being asked for money in the centre of town, it is hardly a secret that the number of those without a stable roof or income has been growing over the last years.

Today these reports have appeared.

Homelessness: Number of rough sleepers in England rises at ‘unprecedented’ rate.

The Independent reports today,

The number of people sleeping rough on England’s streets increased at an “unprecedented” rate last year, official figures show, as charities warned that the impact of welfare cuts and a chronic housing shortage are now taking their toll on the country’s most vulnerable.

Official counts and estimates from councils across England placed the number of rough sleepers on any given night in autumn 2015 at 3,569, according to a Government report.

The figure represents a 30 per cent increase since the same count last year, the biggest annual rise since the current reporting methods were introduced six years ago.

The Mirror says on the same story,

A separate study by the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN) claimed there were actually 7,581 rough sleepers in London alone.

CHAIN counted everyone seen sleeping rough on the capital’s streets at least once during April 2014 to March 2015.

They said that while 3,212 of the rough sleepers they saw were British, 1,388 were Romanian and 639 were from Poland.

CHAIN said 14% of rough sleepers were women and nine per cent were aged over 55.

Some 41% – nearly half – had problems with alcohol.

Now these are people out in the streets.

The numbers of people ‘sofa hopping’, living in temporary accommodation, or, in other words, without a real home, is much much larger.

In the restrictive terms of the Government’s own  homeless duty (that is when they have to do something about providing shelter for families)  these are the most recent figures:

Households accepted as owed a main homelessness duty.

 In England between 1 July and 30 September 2015, local authorities accepted 14,670 households, up 4 per cent compared to the same quarter last year and up 6 per cent from the figure of 13,840 in the previous quarter.

In London, the number of households accepted was 4,700. This is an increase of 5 per cent from 4,460 during the same quarter a year earlier and accounts for 32 per cent of the England total. The number of acceptances in the rest of England in creased 4 per cent from 9,580 in July to September 2014 to 9,970 in July to September 2015.

National Statistics.

This is a key point:

How have welfare reforms had an impact on homelessness?

Cuts to most benefit payments have hit incomes, but the main factor here is the decision to hold down the rate at which housing benefits increase at just one per cent a year since 2013. During this time, rents have continued to rise at a much higher rate. Housing benefits are now set to be frozen for four years. The Crisis charity says that the loss of a private tenancy is now the biggest cause of homelessness and has just completed a survey of 800 landlords which found that more than half are no longer willing to let to people on housing benefit.

The Guardian makes these points:

The report notes that many specialist homelessness mental health teams have shrunk or been closed as a result of funding cuts. Major cuts to subsequent homelessness prevention projects began in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and on average, local authority funding for services for helping vulnerable people avoid homelessness was cut by 45% between 2009-10 and 2014-15, according to the St Mungo’s report, Stop the Scandal.

Howard Sinclair, chief executive of St Mungo’s, said he was concerned by “both the shocking, unprecedented rise in people who are sleeping rough, and evidence that more of this group are struggling with poor mental health”. “Few would disagree that it’s nothing short of a scandal that people with mental health problems are sleeping rough. Not only that, but this incredibly vulnerable group are more likely to remain in dangerous and unhealthy situations for longer,” he said.

The figures come as little surprise to many working in the sector, who have noted a visible rise in the number of tents in parks and people in sleeping bags outside theatres and shops in central London and other big cities. But they mark a dramatic reversal of much of the progress made in the first decade of the century towards eliminating rough sleeping entirely.

We would add that DWP demands on the out-of-work, the way getting JSA is dependent on fulfilling a 35 hour week ‘Job search’, not to mention all the bogus ‘schemes’ for the unemployed may make ‘providers’ wealthy, but they are the last thing needed for anybody, let alone those in the kind of crisis being homeless puts people in.

Sanctions least of all.