“I had my first speech outside Number 10 as prime minister all planned out,” Jeremy Corbyn tells me. “I was going to announce homelessness in Britain ends now, next week no-one will be sleeping rough.” He is sitting on a sofa at the offices of his Peace & Justice Project in Finsbury Park, deep in his north London constituency. “Not bad for a first policy, huh?” he asks, flashing his trademark wry grin. As it happened, the 2019 general election led to a landslide victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. More than 2,000 people still sleep rough across the UK every night.
It is. Local councils manage their own rough sleeper counts and there are incentives to report as low a number as they can. Therefore they all run their counts in the middle of November when temp is so low rough sleeping on the streets is practically a death sentence and they really, really do not bother to count properly even then.