Once again, to correct Shelter

No, this is nonsense:

Extra 40,000 people in England homeless this Christmas, says charity

It is constructed by being horrendously misleading:

Research by Shelter finds 309,000 people set to spend festive season ‘in a tiny hostel room or freezing doorway’ after rise in rough sleeping

We have pointed this out before and as long as people try to deliberately mislead we’re going to have to carry on repeating it.

The number of people homeless, as in rough sleeping, is around the 4,500 mark. Or, over a year, perhaps 8,500 pass through that state. That’s not good, we’d all prefer it didn’t happen and we all also need to realise that it is made up of two essential groups. Some number of runaways and the like who tend to get picked up, swiftly enough, by one of the many charitable groups. The hard core is of those with significant mental health, drug and alcohol addiction problems. For whom the problem is not the lack of housing it’s everything else going wrong in their lives. What we should probably be calling the result of closing the asylums and that care in the community provision of a bracing night in the good cold air.

Polly Neate, Shelter’s chief executive, said 309,000 people would be spending the festive season this year “in a tiny hostel room or freezing in a doorway”.

This is Worstall’s Fallacy in all its glory. Demanding what must be done without accounting for what is already done. To a rough and ready estimation some 304,000 people are being saved, by that welfare state, from a night sleeping rough in a doorway. We already have a system which deals with homelessness. One that deals with it pretty well in fact. A 1 - 2% failure rate is pretty good by any standard let alone government performance.

Now, could it be made better? Sure. Should it be? Sure. But it simply is not true that the country has 309,000 homeless people. So let’s not start our analysis of the problem to be solved from that untrue claim.