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".

Fiddling the figures

I've also got a brief piece in Inside Housing, revealing that the official - and highly disputed - count of people sleeping rough only fell this year because fewer councils carried out formal counts.

Shifting the blame

I've a piece in the New Statesman today, arguing that the government's strategy for dealing with "persistent rough sleeping" is not as liberal as it sounds.

... it is classic new Labour spin: an attempt to redefine an intractable structural problem in personal terms.