Where does the leader of the council get this statistic regarding rough sleepers?

• COUNCIL leader Nickie Aiken says that more than half of the rough sleepers on a “typical night” in the City of Westminster are “from eastern European countries”, (How the city council deals with rough sleepers, March 15).

Where does the leader of the council get this statistic? Not from official sources, that’s for sure. According to the latest figures produced by her own council for a “typical night”, the number of people sleeping rough is 306.

Of these 128 are identified as “EU non-UK nationals” – 42 per cent of the total counted.* This figure also includes western Europeans and people from Ireland.

The more detailed statistics collected by the council’s own outreach workers for the last three months of 2018 states the proportion of central and eastern European nationals as 36 per cent of the people seen rough sleeping.**

These statistics are publicly available and a lay person can look them up. Surely the leader of the council is capable of asking one of her officers to check the actual figures before she rattles off a letter using numbers she’s plucked out of the air?

*Table 2b of Rough Sleeping Statistics, Autumn 2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rough-sleeping-in-england-autumn-2018

** Nationality of people seen rough sleeping by outreach services, page 11, Chain Quarterly Report, Westminster, October-December 2018 (Q3 reports) https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/chain-reports

LINUS REE,
Fitzrovia