The BBC recently published an interesting article about rough sleepers (which is seemingly British English for homeless people, but not quite).
The focus of the article is the lack of reliability of the statistics, as councils don't have to keep a tally when they have (or can reasonably expect to have, presumably) under 10 rough sleepers. In addition, tallies are made only once a year, which leads to a lack of precision (though this could go in both directions).
Looking at the bar chart, only taking those tallies into account clearly means fewer rough sleepers appear on the statistics (the big dip in 2001 is the adoption of that new counting system). The tally that has been given between 2001 and 2009 gives an indication of homelessness in big cities, not across the country.



Yet the biggest fact is hidden by that discussion. How many rough sleepers are there in England? A maximum of 2,560 (number of councils with no statistics i.e. with an estimated maximum of 10 rough sleepers each, multiplied by 10) + 440. Exactly three thousand homeless people (that's quite a bit up on the estimate of 1,247, which is probably closer to the reality).
The BBC News article fails to point out what that figure means. 3,000 is .004% of the English population. I'm not saying that's nothing and that we should be well chuffed about our homelessness situation. We will only be able to give ourselves a pat on the back when no one is forced to sleep on the streets.
But compare it with France. France, in 2004, conducted a tally and found there were 86,000 rough sleepers, i.e. .13% of the population of the country. Paris alone was reported to have a core of 10 to 15 thousand homeless who live continuously on the streets.
I've not been able to work out whether that statistic included people in shelters but I doubt it. From personal experience, the absence of homeless people on the streets of England was what struck me when I first came here. I didn't see any for 10 months and then just the one in London. (I'm not counting one I saw in Edinburgh because it's not England :-P)



What does this mean then? That England trumps France? That's hardly breaking news though. What it genuinely means is that we are in a privileged situation to reach that magic zero figure. In a situation that the French are not in. See, the French have the excuse that they can't help everyone off the streets - we don't. We have that opportunity and the possibility to think that when we help someone off the streets, that person won't simply be replaced by someone else.
So next time you see someone on the streets, spend some time with them, help them in whichever way you can. Simply because you can.