Jonathan Billings is standing in the porch of the Wellspring, the homeless charity he runs in Stockport town centre.

On the wall is a myriad of faces, mostly men, all with names underneath, some also with ages. One has no picture, just the name ‘Neville’.

“We didn’t even know his surname,” he says. “A week after we opened, he was found dead in a doorway. It was his death that really got people involved in the charity.”

The Wellspring is one of few organisations to keep a record every time a homeless person they know dies.

Incredibly, no public agencies - not the police, not councils, not coroners, not the NHS, not the government - bother to properly track them, which is why I’ve come to see Jonathan.

Moving along the rows of faces, he continues.

“Sean killed himself,” he says, nodding to one man. “He jumped out of a top storey window a couple of months ago.

“Matthew died about six months ago. He massively overdosed on heroin in the toilets in the Merseyway.

“He went in the toilet at 8am and they didn’t find him til they were shutting it at night. They had to break the door down.

“David died smoking in the back of his van.

“Richard was such a lovely lad. He had a spice episode. They found him last winter under a bush. He died in hospital.”

And of a handsome, cheerful face: “Daniel went through Manchester City’s academy as a kid.

“He was a brilliant footballer, died from liver failure after a couple of years of alcohol abuse. He really could have been a footballer, he was so gifted.”

“Often it starts with drinking. We all like to go for a drink and socialise. What is it that makes some people carry that on? And carry on, and carry on?”

Finally, to arguably the most symbolic death.

“Stefan Tomkins was in the bin,” he says, sadly.

Stefan, described by his parents as an athletic, promising student who had dropped out of university after tipping into a ‘bottomless’ spiral of drugs, was 31 when he died in 2009.

The photo shows him as a fresh-faced, fluffy-haired 12 or 13-year-old in the early 1990s, smiling through a brace.

“He was crushed to death in the bin by the bin lorry,” says Jonathan, “on the night they did the annual rough sleeper count and didn’t find anybody.”

I am here because a week earlier, on the morning of July 29, the body of a rough sleeper had been found in Manchester city centre.

In the following day’s news conference the editor had said, quite reasonably, that we should do something broader about how many homeless people die, and who they are.

“Nobody really records them,” I said.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Which, inevitably, ended up becoming the point of this article.

No proper figures exist. No press releases are issued. We are stabbing around in the dark. All of which makes you wonder: if these were CEOs who had been found dead, or doctors, or in fact anyone of some sort of social status, would there be this much silence?

Researching this story has proved that trying to find out how many Stefans, Davids or Daniels there have actually been is literally impossible.

Incredibly for a conurbation with such a high-profile homelessness problem, no-one apart from individual charities counts deaths properly or builds a picture of what, collectively, their circumstances, locations, ages or causes of death might tell us. Often all you are left with is information - sometimes not quite accurate - that drifts back either from helpful homelessness workers or people on the streets themselves.

In the case of the young man found on Whitworth Street West a couple of weeks ago, we only knew he had died in the first place because a member of the public rang in to say the road was shut early on Sunday morning. By the time a reporter called the police about it, his death had already been declared ‘non-suspicious’ and the road swiftly reopened.

When my colleague Steve went out the next day to ask other rough sleepers what had happened, he was told the man was called Donn Morgan, a man in this 30s from Wythenshawe.

They spoke, too, of a second death - a man called Luke. We tracked him down on Facebook: his name was Luke Urmston. He died within days of Donn Morgan, yards away. Both names were subsequently confirmed to us by the coroner, but we never would have known about either of them had it not been for chance.

Added to those two recent deaths is also a third: Stephen Donoghue, 40, a well-known rough sleeper who died after being found in the canal in Ancoats at the end of June.

Again, we only know he died because a charity contact mentioned it.

That’s three deaths on the city centre’s streets in just over a month, all of which we discovered by luck.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

There may have been one or two others in recent weeks, too, for whom we only have first names, along with blurry third-hand details of possible spice overdoses.

Have there been more? We don’t know.

One public official suggested last week, when I asked them about the latest street deaths, that I was just working off ‘anecdote’ rather than ‘fact’. But that’s the problem: however many times you ask, public agencies don’t keep or release many ‘facts’ on homeless deaths.

Death on the street is only part of the picture, however.

Beyond the fleeting road closures and canalside cordons are the many, many other hidden homeless people who die while destitute, languishing in temporary accommodation, guest houses and bed and breakfasts.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Derek Jackson, 63, was one of them.

An alcoholic, he was found a couple of years ago by the Wellspring and his family in a Middleton flat so squalid that the charity says it had never seen anything like it. Neighbours had been taking money from him and no public agency appeared to have intervened.

The Wellspring rescued him and placed him into a Stockport B&B, where he fell ill and died.

His son Mike is under no illusions that it was alcohol that ultimately led to Derek’s death. He hadn’t really seen his dad - who was originally a taxi driver before his marriage broke down and he tipped into alcoholism - for years, for exactly that reason.

Nevertheless, for him it is all too easy for homeless people, and their deaths, to become invisible.

“People might look at a homeless man and think ‘it doesn’t matter about him’,” he says. “But they’ve still got someone who loves them, who is searching for them. They are just lost, aren’t they?

“My dad was only homeless for about a week, but he might as well have been sleeping rough in that flat we had found him in.”

Derek’s is not an unfamiliar story to those working in homelessness. Yet his death doesn’t exist anywhere in any meaningful figures, even if he is on the Wellspring’s memorial wall. Just as it is currently impossible to actually know how many hidden homeless people like him there are, equally it is hard to know how many of them are dying, or why.

The notorious Val’s hotel in Ardwick is a good case in point.

Val’s has been known for years among charities and council officers as somewhere you enter at your peril. When I first started writing about homelessness five years ago its name came up quickly for all the wrong reasons.

Late last year, I heard that at least two homeless people had recently died in there, so I started asking some questions about what had happened.

The police said they couldn’t find the query on their system, so they couldn’t help, or find out any more.

So I tried using the Freedom of Information Act to ask the police and ambulance service about Val’s, but while the information I got back was useful in showing how much of a nightmare the place was for other reasons, it didn’t show up any deaths.

This didn’t sound right. But I moved on with the story I was already writing about hidden homeless slums, still with the deaths lurking in the back of my mind.

Then, a few months later - just after we had published that investigation in March - I heard about more deaths at the hotel.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

I went to the council. If this many people had died in quick succession in a dodgy hotel long known for being unofficial homelessness accommodation, presumably either the council’s housing or homelessness departments would know about it.

But the council said that it didn’t - and sent me back to the police, who weren’t investigating, because no crime had been committed.

It turns out, however, that those people I had heard about did indeed exist and did indeed die.

William Richardson died in October. Kevin O’Hanlon and John Mongan died in December. John Barnes and Neil Gibson both died on March 24.

Five deaths in six months. Nevertheless Val’s held onto its council-issued ‘housing of multiple occupation’ licence right up to the point it was sold at the start of the summer, before promptly burning down.

Last week I asked the council again about the people who died there, this time armed with their names and coroner’s confirmation of their deaths.

“Anecdotally, we were aware that there had been a couple of deaths at Vals,” it said.

“However as there was no official mechanism for reporting deaths we were not aware of the names of the people, number of deaths or the circumstances.”

A ‘new process’ it is now planned to rectify that, it added.

How was Val’s able to hold on to its licence if the council knew people were dying there, albeit ‘anecdotally’?

“At present there is nothing requiring any HMO licensed landlord to inform the council about any deaths in their properties,” it said.

“If any of the deaths had related to the management of the property or the living conditions in the property then a review of the landlord’s procedures could have been undertaken.”

Ultimately, there were no boxes to tick, so none were ticked.

Homeless death is, as you may have gathered, an infuriatingly difficult issue to investigate: impossible to pin down. Are numbers going up or going down? And where? And possibly most importantly, why?

The closest I’ve got to an answer is a set of figures from Manchester’s coroner (no others in Greater Manchester could provide any numbers) and some ballpark estimates from the council.

Manchester’s coroner doesn’t record how many homeless deaths there have been in the city in total, but can say its office has investigated 50 deaths of ‘no fixed abode’ in the last five years.

Those deaths have been steadily creeping up each year. In 2018, the coroner has been recording roughly one every six weeks.

The average age for someone listed as ‘no fixed abode’ is 43. Of the 50 deaths, 48 were men. The youngest was 28, the oldest was 90.

In addition, the council says 23 people it has ‘officially’ been placed into temporary accommodation have died since 2010, figures that have never previously been published anywhere. If this sounds low, it’s worth bearing in mind that they will only apply to those owed a legal rehousing duty by the council, which doesn’t apply to hundreds of others living in the B&Bs and guesthouses we reported in March.

Meanwhile the council didn’t start counting rough sleeper deaths at all until the start of this year, but so far it says it is aware of nine. It hasn’t published that figure until now either and, it admits, this won’t be the real total, as there isn’t yet a proper counting system in place.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

So this, after weeks - arguably months - of investigation, is the best I can do. Its a very partial picture, but it does at least show that, at the bare minimum, one rough sleeper a month has been dying on Manchester’s streets this year. Charities believe the figure to be far higher.

I have no idea whatsoever how many homeless people are dying in bed and breakfasts.

National charity Homeless Link has long been angry about what is essentially a black hole of information nationally, arguing it is a ‘disgrace’ that public bodies do not join the dots.

It wants every local authority to use existing ‘safeguarding adults reviews’ - similar to those used when a child dies in the care of the council - to check whether homeless deaths could have been prevented. None of these have been carried out so far in Manchester.

“In the past, deaths of people who are rough sleeping has been an invisible issue and the lack of attention and any data on this issue is damaging and needs to be addressed,” says Homeless Link chief executive Rick Henderson.

“The death of someone sleeping rough needs to be treated seriously and safeguarding adult reviews should be carried out for all such incidents, regardless of whether the individuals have had contact with statutory services.”

Homeless Link believes that without something of this nature - something all agencies can feed into, from the police to the council and the NHS - then dying while destitute does indeed render you invisible.

“We need access to reliable research as it will help us to understand and bring an end to this disgraceful issue,” adds Rick.

“People who are homeless are often accessing multiple services, and yet still find it hard to get the support they need, and so effective partnership working is key.

“Reviews will help public and voluntary agencies to identify how they might have intervened earlier or worked differently to avoid an individual falling through the gaps.

(Image: PA)

“The learning, recommendations and the data from these reviews will be invaluable for better understanding this issue, improving the support available for vulnerable people and preventing needless future deaths.”

The last point is surely key. If the system doesn’t pay attention to these deaths, it’s less likely to try and stop more from happening.

That’s particularly important when you consider many homeless people were originally in the care of the state to begin with. Many on the city’s streets have no family to inform if they die, and nobody to kick up a fuss if they do.

City centre youth charity Lifeshare acts as official next of kin to around two thirds of the young people it sees for exactly that reason. Its former criminal justice lead Julie Boyle echoes the private thoughts of many charities I ask about the situation.

“If it was posh people dying in this way, it would be uproar,” she says. “But because they’re runaways, or they’ve been in care, or they’re prostitutes, the system doesn’t care.”

Back in Stockport, Jonathan is finding me a photo on his phone. It’s of Derek Jackson, the man they rescued from slum accommodation in Middleton.

“It was the worst flat I’ve ever been in,” he says, showing me the photo he was looking for. It looks like a rubbish tip, but indoors.

“There were cans up to the windowsill across the whole room.

“The cans were rattling as the rats and mice were running all over the place underneath them. The kitchen - I’ve never seen this before. I thought it was a hammock when I walked in, but it was cobwebs. They looked like rope.

“There was no water, no electricity. The door had been kicked in, other people were just coming in and using his flat, no locks, it was totally insecure. Just horrific.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

“It’s stories like that that just prove this issue needs to be out there.”

There is no question many people working in public agencies here care about people like Derek, Stefan Tomkins or Martin Hyde just as much as Jonathan Billings does.

But until their deaths are literally counted, institutional indifference will continue to tell a different story.

What the mayor’s office says

Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester, Bev Hughes said: “Homelessness has become a humanitarian crisis in this country. The effects of rough sleeping on people’s physical and mental health are often catastrophic and that is why Greater Manchester has led the way on creating a joined-up approach with the public, private, faith and voluntary sectors to end the need for rough sleeping in our city-region.

“To tackle homelessness we must understand the scale of the problem. Greater Manchester recognises that to have a situation where we do not know how many rough sleepers have died on our streets is simply not acceptable and cannot continue.

“Discussions with government are ongoing but we are also bringing together all of our public services next month to make real progress on this issue.

“Together we will ensure there is a bed every night for every rough sleeper in our city region - nobody should ever die on the streets of Greater Manchester.”

(Image: Mark Waugh)

What the council says

Councillor Bev Craig, executive member for Adults Health and Wellbeing said: “We record the deaths of homeless people who we have been officially involved with and we have recently changed our practice to start recording any rough sleeper death that has come to our attention through our own work or through partner agencies.

“However, we know that this isn’t a comprehensive picture because there is no obligation for other agencies or organisations to report any known deaths to the council or other partners. “We are looking to put in place a process to ensure that this information will be collated through the Manchester Safeguarding Board.”

“Two deaths, earlier this year, were referred to Adult Safeguarding but a Safeguarding Adult Review has not been deemed appropriate in either case.”

What the police say

Superintendent Chris Hill of GMP’s City of Manchester Team said: “In Greater Manchester we have a large homeless community, and on occasions have to investigate the deaths of people who have been living on the streets, or who have no fixed abode.

“Sadly, many homeless people have serious health issues, they are in and out of hospital and many don’t live a healthy lifestyle. This means that tragically we see more deaths than we would like in this community.

“GMP officers and staff will investigate every sudden death that is reported to us, not just those who are homeless. The investigations may be very straightforward and the death easily explained, or it may take some time to establish the exact circumstances surrounding a death.

“Once it has been established that a death is not suspicious a file will be passed on to HM Coroner who from that point directs any further investigation and procedures. HM Coroner may also request further investigation by GMP in some circumstances.

“Figures for the number of homeless people who die are not collected by Greater Manchester Police, their deaths form part of the figures for all non-suspicious deaths that we investigate.

“Should there be cause for concern that a venue or area is the location for more deaths than is normal or that can be explained, then an investigation would be launched with our partners and other agencies to ensure all is being done to safeguard those who live there.

“We will continue to work with our partners and homeless charities to ensure as many people as possible access treatment and safe housing to help them live healthier lifestyles and hopefully prevent unnecessary deaths.

“We are open to learning new and better ways or recording statistics and should it be necessary to begin recording deaths in different ways we will do our best to ensure all that can be done is being done.”