It is well known that official figures fail to capture the true scale of rough sleeping in England. Yet if the government is to end this blight, as Boris Johnson has promised, we must understand the numbers involved. That means accurately counting the number of people who are living on the country’s streets.
The reason the figures – drawn up from councils’ count of rough sleepers on one night in autumn or an estimate by local charities – are widely disbelieved is because they do not tally with the scale of human misery the public sees in the doorways, on the park benches and in the fields up and down the country.
The government says there were 4,266 people on the streets on one night in autumn 2019, a fall of 9% on the year before. The absurdity of official national figures is that they are about half of those recorded just in London by outreach workers in 2018. When the BBC used freedom of information requests to ask councils for rough sleeping contacts throughout the year, rather than just for the snapshot, the figure in England was closer to 25,000 – five times the official count. Such a glaring disparity leads to questions in the public mind about whether official figures are produced objectively.
There are many reasons for the rise in rough sleeping in the last decade – such as alcoholism and poor mental health – but this was a crisis made in Downing Street by Tory prime ministers. The average rough sleeper dies before the age of 50. The decision to shrink welfare payments and cut housing benefit played a significant part in the distress which was so obvious two years ago that MPs accused ministers of being “unacceptably complacent” about the issue. The response was to commit to end rough sleeping by 2027. Compassionate conservatism is a brand that Mr Johnson sells. In December he vowed to end rough sleeping by 2024. Talk is cheap. As John Healey points out, at this rate of improvement it will be 2037 before Mr Johnson’s pledge is met.
The rough sleeping statistics are an underestimate and provide an unreliable guide to the problem. The UK Statistics Authority should take up Mr Healey’s suggestion to investigate their accuracy, given that there are suspicions that Whitehall changed the way the figures in 2018 were collected to produce drops in the count a year later. This is urgent: ministers use the data to target areas with the highest numbers of people at risk of rough sleeping.
All governments find it tempting to tweak the numbers they are judged by. But in doing this they deprive themselves of a key policy tool. The prerequisite for public trust is that official numbers are correct, and they must reach the public as free as possible from propaganda. Boris Johnson wants to bridge the trust deficit that was exposed on the campaign trail in December. The prime minister must be honest about the extent of the crisis on our streets if he wants to be taken seriously when he acts as if he is being provoked into remedying it.
