Rough sleeping on the rise after falling for years

IT’S GOING to be a hard winter for Greater Manchester’s homeless. It always is.

- ETHAN DAVIES

But after years of steady improvements in getting the numbers of rough sleepers down, the level of people sleeping on the streets shot up by 13 percent in 2022. That took it to 102 cases on the night the count was taken, which is the national standard for recording levels of homelessness.

And there was an even larger increase from 2022 to August. The official count recorded 145 people sleeping rough in the summer, a rise of 42pc. Worse still, city-region leaders expect the situation to worsen when the next count takes place later this month.

That being said, the 2022 level was 62pc lower than the peak of 2017.