Official figures on rough sleeping in England currently only record the numbers counted or estimated to be sleeping out on a single night.
Ahead of the release of the latest figures, we sent FOI requests to every council in the UK responsible for housing and asked how many individuals they recorded sleeping rough over an entire year.
In February 2020 we reported on the results.
We found 28,000 cases recorded, 25,000 of them in England, and this was five times higher than the previous single night snapshot had shown.
About three quarters had usable figures, although they counted in different ways. For London we had to use the 2018-19 CHAIN figures and for some councils in Wales we were referred to official Welsh government statistics. In Scotland councils provided figures for housing applicants who said they’d slept rough at some point in the preceding three months.
The figures do not contradict the government’s single night snapshot, but they do show there are many more people who sleep rough over the course of a year than are recorded in the snapshot.
The homelessness charity Crisis has called for better recording to show the true scale of the problem of rough sleeping.
The BBC's figures were used in reporting on official homelessness statistics later that week by The Guardian, by the Liverpool Echo and by Birmingham Live, while the Press Association's stories on the statistics also referred to the BBC FOI.
The story was also picked up by a number of publications including the Hartlepool Mail and the Independent.
- XLS: Rough sleeping data provided in responses to FOI requests
- Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government: Rough sleeping in England: autumn 2018
- Nancy Webb, who "has been in and out of hostels for the past 10 years"
- Stephen Dare, who "has recently been housed in a flat but said he spent most of the past decade homeless"
- Jane Cranston, chairwoman, the Oxford Homeless Movement
- Councillor Linda Smith, deputy leader, Oxford City Council
- Spokeswoman, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)
- Councillor Linda Woodings, Nottingham City Council
- Jon Sparkes, chief executive, Crisis
- Councillor David Renard, housing spokesman, Local Government Association
- Spokesman, Government
- Choropleth map: People bedding down outside per 10,000 households in one year
- Bar chart: Number of individuals who bedded down outside at least once per 10,000 households, top 20 councils
This is the 10th story the data unit have done related to homelessness. You can see all homelessness-related stories tagged 'homelessness' here