Nope, sorry, don’t believe this number:
The number of homeless people in Britain has risen to 391,000;
Dodgy Statistics
9 responses
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The number is meaningless – it’s all a question of definition, but apart from the usual drivel about excessive City bonuses (boni?) it’s actually a pretty good article analysing Nulab’s disastrous housing policies.
As he says, the answer is grant more planning permission and put a surcharge on empty properties. He ignores the effect of mass immigration and voluntary poverty, but hey. -
Remember, homeless doesn’t necessarily mean “sleeping on the streets”.
If you’re forced to stay on the floor of your friends’ house for a month because you can’t pay rent for whatever reason, then counting you as ‘homeless’ seems reasonable. Likewise if the council puts you and your kids up in one room of a B&B (at a higher cost to the taxpayer than providing you with a home…). -
“Nope, sorry, don’t believe this number”
Why not?
Tim adds: The number sleeping rough in London is currently around 1,000 people. Gotta be an awful lot of people sleeping in hedge rows to get up to that higher figure then. -
So, you still don’t understand the difference between ‘homeless’ and ‘sleeping rough’, then?
Tim adds: I do understand how the two words have been differentiated over the years, yes (in the same way that investment and current public spending seem t have changed meanings), but I regard them as synonyms. -
“I regard them as synonyms”
Well, they’re not.
Tim adds: Google definitions. Number one result:
“someone with no housing; “the homeless became a problem in the large cities””
They are. -
If ‘homeless’ is defined as ‘Big Issue Sellers’ – then I think 391,000 is probably an underestimate…
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The New Labour definition of homeless is the number of people living in a house 40% smaller than the mean house size.
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“They are.”
I don’t think you get to claim that someone else is wrong simply because you’re using a completely different definition of terms than they are.
And the irony is, of course, that you can only argue that so few are ‘really homeless’ because the welfare state does such a great job of ensuring that the wider homeless group (ie, those without a home – do I need to capitalise that to make it more obvious or something?) do not end up sleeping rough, the very same welfare state that you so bitterly oppose. You can endorse the current state-led approach to tackling homelessness or you can acknowledge that the problem is far greater than those who are sleeping rough, but you can’t have it both ways.
Tim adds: Why do I have to accept that the current Welfare State does such a good job just because 300,000 people aren’t sleeping rough? The US doesn’t have our welfare state and they don’t have (with 5x the population) 1.5 million sleeping rough.
There as here, sleeping rough is a sign of alcohol, drug or mental problems. Things neither state nor market systems deal well with. -
“The US doesn’t have our welfare state and they don’t have (with 5x the population) 1.5 million sleeping rough.”
Er, they do have state-provided housing for the homeless in America, Tim.
“sleeping rough is a sign of alcohol, drug or mental problems.”
Assuming that’s true for a minute, it’s precisely because all the *homeless* people who would otherwise be sleeping rough are instead provided with temporary accommodation by the state. If they weren’t, then sleeping rough would not be confined to those with those problems you list.
Which of course it isn’t. There’s all those Polish guys around Victoria who don’t have work and who aren’t eligible for housing, for example. That’s a very small example of what you would get if you took away state-funded temporary accommodation – a gigantic rough sleeping problem.
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