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Showing posts from September, 2015

Rough sleeping: Facts, fables, fatalities

‘ Ex-services personnel make up 25% of the rough sleeping population’ stated a business leader to me at a recent event with what a colleague caustically referred to later as ‘the unerring certainty of the terminally ignorant’.  His pronouncement came to mind as I was reading the latest CHAIN annual rough sleeping figures for London   which show that 9% of the rough sleeping population were formerly in the armed services; 3% in the UK armed services and 6% in the armed services of other countries. I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to groups and individuals about rough sleeping and invariably the conversation will coalesce around two questions: who and why? Around both swirl myths and misconceptions. The antidote to the plausible but unsubstantiated anecdote upon which, distressingly, policy decisions are occasionally based is the CHAIN report and data which is unique in terms of the richness of the information and its reliability. The data is compiled cumulatively