'This is their bedroom': counting rough sleepers in England's homeless hotspots

Once a year, volunteers take to the streets to try to capture the scale of a problem that everyone knows is getting worse

As rough sleeping rises nationally, the exact scale of the crisis remains hard to capture. The official data shows that in England, rough sleeping has risen for six years in a row. The latest figures estimated that 4,134 people bedded down outside in 2016, up 16% on the previous year. Though London remains the centre of rough sleeping, accounting for 23% of the national total (and in Westminster, with 260 rough sleepers, the highest number of cases), the rate is increasing much faster outside the capital, in places such as Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham.

Each winter across the country, councils send teams of volunteers to conduct night-time counts of all the rough sleepers in the borough to assess how acute the problem is. Recent counts in the homelessness hotspots of Cambridge and Hackney, east London, reveal how the problem is evolving.

Continue reading...

from Voluntary Sector Network | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2zdBNfj