A grave omission

On Valentine’s Day, a homeless man was found dead in the pedestrian subway near the Houses of Parliament. This week, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire published the government’s response, its much-delayed £100 million ‘rough sleeping strategy’, which includes the eye-catching initiative to eradicate all rough sleeping by 2027. Charities and Labour were unimpressed, quickly working out that the promised funding was not new money but appeared to have been reallocated from other budgets.

But what caught my eye was a vague plan to ‘work with’ local councils to carry out reviews into the deaths of homeless people. It is hard to tackle a problem which at present is not even being monitored. Not only are homelessness deaths not investigated in this country but, incredibly, they’re not even properly counted.

This extraordinary black hole of information formed the subject of an investigation I carried out for the Manchester Evening News this week, prompted by the death of a rough sleeper in the city centre at the end of last month — a tragedy we knew about only because a member of the public told us the road had been cordoned off. It transpired that two weeks earlier a second man had died just yards away.

We wanted to tell the story of those who die while homeless — who they are, where they came from, how they lost their lives. But I quickly found that to be almost impossible. Neither Manchester City Council nor any other authority records these deaths. There is thus no data that would allow us or anyone else researching the issue to build a picture of what, collectively, their circumstances, locations or causes of death might tell us. In many cases the only thing we had to go on was anecdotal information — sometimes not entirely accurate — which came either from helpful homelessness workers or from people who are themselves living on the streets.