New analysis of council spending in England has exposed a cruel twist in the homelessness scandal: single homeless people are paying the price for the growing number of families in desperate need of shelter.

The true scale of homelessness is obscured thanks to the official figures being inherently unreliable. But as an investigation by WPI Economics for the charities St Mungo’s and Homeless Link makes clear, even by the government’s own reckoning, more than 4,500 people were sleeping rough in England last year while more than 80,000 households were in temporary accommodation.

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According to 2017 figures from the charity Crisis, the number of households in England, Scotland and Wales defined as suffering “core” homelessness – which includes all forms of temporary shelter such as rough sleeping, sofa surfing, squatting and hostels as well as temporary housing – is likely to be about 160,000. It rose by 33% between 2011 and 2016.

In 2017, almost 600 people died sleeping rough in England and Wales, aged, on average, just 47.

The WPI analysis shows that, between 2008-09 and 2017-18, spending by English local authorities on homelessness-related activity fell by 27% from £2.8bn to just over £2bn. During this time, the number of rough sleepers more than doubled and the number of households accepted as eligible for homelessness support rose by more than a third.

But within these figures, spending on family homelessness increased by more than 20%, while spending on single homelessness fell by more than 50%.

The collapse in support for single homeless people is entirely due to a two-thirds reduction in spending on the Supporting People programme, a government scheme launched in 2003 to help people live independently, after a ringfence protecting the money was removed in 2009.

Meanwhile, the cost of temporary accommodation for homeless families rose by around a quarter. So in the face of drastic cuts to local authority spending, councils have been forced to prioritise emergency accommodation for homeless families at the expense of support for single homeless people.

The data for individual regions rams this point home. Councils in the north-west of England cut total spending on homelessness by 56%. But they did so by increasing spending on families by 56% while cutting support for single homeless people by 73%. Similarly, total funding in the West Midlands was cut by 42% but support for families increased by 15%, while funding for single homeless people fell by 59%. Variations on this pattern were played out across the country. In every region, there has been a fall of at least a third in spending on single homeless people.

The practical implications are devastating. Despite rising demand, the number of beds in England for single homeless people has fallen from 50,000 to 35,000 in nine years, and thresholds for help have been tightened.

The report spells out that if total expenditure on homelessness had stayed constant, an additional £5bn would have been spent over the past nine years. Set against this, the trivial amounts periodically thrown at the problem by ministers when the political pressure gets too intense – such as £20m for the homelessness prevention trailblazers programme and £76m over two years for the rough sleeping initiative fund – are exposed as a cruel deception.

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All this is happening as other government policies pile on the pressure for people living on the margins. To name just two, the freeze in local housing allowance makes rents increasingly unaffordable while cuts in substance misuse treatments kick away another source of help.

Even the Homelessness Reduction Act – intended to increase help for people not in priority need – may be having the unintended consequence of driving resources towards crisis management rather than early intervention because when councils are faced with the choice of what to cut, taking money out of preventive or early intervention services is less likely to put them in breach of their statutory duties.

It is difficult to conceive a more warped approach to social justice than single homeless people, in effect, footing the bill for supporting homeless families. The WPI research reveals the remorseless, pitiless logic of a decade of austerity. However little you have, there is still some more to take away.

• Richard Vize is a public policy commentator and analyst