Streetwise

The department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) continues to spin announcements that are not backed up by reality. As I describe in a piece on newstatesman.com, they have made what could be a landmark commitment to end rough sleeping by 2012 but put no new money or ideas into the task.

Rather worryingly, CLG has now scrapped the idea of a national (England) estimate of the number of rough sleeping after the headline figure refused to drop in the last five years. Many of the measures trailed in CLG's press release are not stood up by its "action plan".