It was colder than I expected on the morning of the London marathon this April. As I walked through the empty streets of the city towards the river to watch the women’s elites near the finishing line at around 10am, I noticed something.
There were tents. Everywhere. Clusters of two or three. Dotted around in tiny encampments as I made my way through Kings Cross, Bloomsbury and Holborn.
These tents, some of which seemed to contain people who were still sleeping, were striking. And not only because it felt too chilly to be waking up outside.
When I moved back to London from university in 2010, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, tents lining the streets just wasn’t something you saw. Certainly not on this scale.
It’s not just London. Rough sleeping is on the rise across the country. Rough sleeping in England reached a record level in autumn 2024, with an estimated 4,667 people sleeping on the streets on a single night. That’s a 20 per cent increase from 2023.
I’ve recently been travelling around the country, and from Stoke-on-Trent to Hartlepool, tents were home to rough sleepers.
square VICKY SPRATT
The return of people living in tents on our streets is England's national shame
Read MoreIn Blackpool, the situation got so bad last year that the council started removing tents because, as councillor Michelle Scott said, they did not want encampments like the ones seen “in California.”
Several homelessness charities have told me they are increasingly being alerted to small tent encampments popping up across England.
Matt Downie, the chief executive of Crisis, said: “The number of people sleeping rough and in tents has been increasing as the safety nets that should stop people being pushed into poverty and destitution are failing.”
According to Crisis, nine in ten people sleeping rough in England have experienced violence or abuse on the streets.
The rising number of tents on our streets is a symptom of wider problems: a lack of affordable housing, poverty, unemployment, relationship breakdowns, and cutting support for migrants – whether they are asylum seekers or not – who do not yet have leave to remain in the UK (no recourse to public funds or NRPF).
But, regardless of the reason, nobody should be living in a tent on the street. Not least because it increases the risk of disease for the person inside and creates a wider public health issue.
And yet, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the newly elected Reform Mayor of Lincolnshire, has implied that she wants more tents. Over the weekend, she said that she would like migrants to be housed in tents, not hotels. Jenkyns says she doesn’t want to see tents lining England’s streets; instead, she’d like to see them in a “confined area”.
Her idea conjures up images reminiscent of the notorious Calais refugee and immigrant encampment, the Jungle. The poor living conditions at the now-dismantled tent city caused outbreaks of scabies, lice, respiratory infections and diarrhoea. Rats and mice ran around the Jungle. Vermin can carry salmonella and leptospira, the latter of which is associated with Weil’s disease and can cause organ failure.
The housing of asylum seekers has increasingly stoked community tensions. In the riots that took place across England in August 2024, a Holiday Inn Express, which is used by the Home Office to house people who are seeking leave to remain, was targeted. More than 60 men were jailed for their part in the disorder outside the hotel.
Given these tensions, it’s hard to believe tents would keep people experiencing homelessness or local communities safe.
People are living in tents because they’re desperate, but for local communities where these mini-encampments are springing up, the existence of this sort of rough sleeping can make residents feel unsafe and worried.
It doesn’t have to be like this. In 1999, Tony Blair vowed to reduce the number of rough sleepers by two-thirds in just three years. In 2002, his government announced that they had exceeded their target ahead of time. The number of rough sleepers in England had fallen from 1,850 to 532.
Rough sleeping numbers stayed low through the 2000s. And when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took over, it started to rise. This was partly because the way rough sleepers were counted changed, but also because the number of people seeking asylum in the UK has risen since then, as has the number of people being evicted from privately rented accommodation.
Repeating New Labour’s disappearing trick for rough sleeping will be much harder for Housing Secretary Angela Rayner to do today. But that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t try to reduce these worryingly high numbers. Labour’s homelessness strategy is rather conspicuous by its absence right now.
Voters should be sceptical that Reform can solve this crisis at a local level by simply decanting asylum seekers from hotels and into tents. It wouldn’t stop people coming to the UK to seek asylum, as is their right. The appalling conditions in the Jungle did not deter people from entering Europe.
Indeed, convincing voters that turning their local football pitch into a tent encampment seems like a hard sell. How do you feel about a potential Weil’s disease outbreak at the end of your road?
Hardly an election winner, is it? And, more importantly, it would be a complete public health and humanitarian disaster.
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