Hm – looks like it’s on the up again.

Sleep usually comes relatively easy for me. But on these warm spring nights when there is too much on my mind for sleeping, I have developed a habit of wandering the streets around where I live, chatting through the issues with myself. And in those nightime peregrinations, inevitably, being in the business, I have started to count the number of people I see bedded down in doorways, alleys and parks.

Nothing scientific, of course. Just a bit of a personal headcount and not representative of anything other than how street sleeping is moving in one particular microclimate. But, put it together with the anecdotal evidence from elsewhere, and the results of the formal counts over the past year or more and the pattern is clear. Rough sleeping is on the up again.

Now, rough sleeping is, for Shelter, only a fraction of our business. There are hundreds of excellent agencies out there to cover that end of the market and, in sheer numbers at least, rooflessness forms only a relatively small proportion of overall housing need. But we were instrumental in inspiring Government to launch its drive against rough sleeping a decade ago – Blair chose a Shelter event to promise action. And it would be a real shame if one of the (relatively few) shining successes of Government housing policy over the past ten years were allowed to be reversed.