The housing minister is to be applauded for acting on his pledge to introduce a more accurate account of England’s rough sleeping population.

As Grant Shapps, then shadow housing minister, pointed out in his 2007 paper on the ‘hidden homeless’, the previous government’s figures grossly underestimated the number of people for whom bed means the cold, hard ground. By now including estimates from councils which do not conduct actual counts, the official number of rough sleepers has trebled.

Sticking to his word was the easy part. But Mr Shapps has simply made the true scale of the problem official. Now he must do something about it. Axing the eight homelessness prevention experts from his department may have reduced its wage bill. Whether the volunteers replacing them will be an effective alternative remains to be seen.

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