A tent city next to Mayfair: Why cutting homelessness might be harder than before

On a recent evening, on one of London’s most exclusive roads, an estate agent was selling a property for £16.5m. Outside the agency, on the other side of Park Lane, was an encampment of approximately 24 tents housing rough sleepers.

Some were sitting outside, taking in the warm night air. Others were reading by torchlight.

Rough sleeping is on the rise across England but the tents like these increasingly appearing in the country’s towns and cities are only the most visible signs of a much bigger problem.

Homelessness is, by some measures, at record levels. Over 150,000 children, for instance, are living in temporary accommodation, often miles from their schools and their friends. On occasion, some are forced to live with their entire family in one cramped, sometimes mouldy, room.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner says England is in the “middle of the worst housing crisis in living memory”.

To tackle this, the new government is proposing to set up a homelessness reduction unit and in its manifesto, Labour said it would “put Britain back on track to ending homelessness”.

This might sound ambitious, but homelessness is something that governments have successfully tackled previously.

Labour’s manifesto said it would meet its promises on homelessness by “building on the lessons of our past” – a reference to the Blair government’s success in dramatically cutting rough sleeping.

In 1999, Tony Blair committed to reducing the number of rough sleepers by two-thirds in three years. By 2002, his government declared it had achieved its target a year early – the number of rough sleepers in England had fallen from 1,850 to 532.

These numbers remained low for most of the remainder of the decade. The method the government uses to count rough sleeping has changed over the years but experts agree that rough sleeping fell under Labour.

In 2010, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office, the figures showed an 11-year low of 440 rough sleepers on any given night. However the then-Housing Minister Grant Shapps said he was “sceptical” that the figures reflected “the true situation on the streets” and so the counting method was revised.

Under the new methodology, the number of rough sleepers in England stood at 1,768 in 2010. After that the numbers rose, peaking in 2017. Now, the latest official figures, external put it at 3,898 – 120% higher than in 2010.

Even during the pandemic, when the Conservatives pursued an “Everyone In” effort to protect rough sleepers from Covid – often using hotels that couldn’t accept paying guests – the number of people sleeping outside never fell below 2,400.

The evidence of the Blair years gives Labour the confidence, however, to say it knows how to cut homelessness. But repeating the trick in 2024 may not be as easy as it was before.

And most experts believe the latest figure is a huge underestimate.

The annual snapshot, which counts the number of people found to be rough sleeping on a single night each autumn, was found by the UK Statistics Authority to fall short in “trustworthiness, quality, and value”. It doesn’t include, for instance, a person known to be a rough sleeper, but not visible on the night of the count.

And it’s not just the numbers that are greater today – the type of rough sleeper is different, too.