It is the census that utterly shames us as a nation. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the number of people dying homeless is at an all-time high. An estimated 726 homeless people died in England and Wales in 2018, a 22% rise on 2017. The biggest rise was in drug-related deaths, up by 55% since 2017. This, in one of the world’s richest nations, is a moral emergency – and it demands emergency action.

Since I lost my dad to a tragic lifelong struggle with drink, I’ve worked with Birmingham’s homeless community. What drives me is the simple realisation that so many people sleeping rough are self-medicating for trauma and distress with drugs and alcohol in exactly the same way my dad did.

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That trauma and distress could hit any one of us. Everyone I’ve ever met sleeping homeless has been hit, hurt and knocked down by some sort of twist of fate. But the destruction of Britain’s safety net – what we once called social insurance – means there is now nothing to catch us. The rollback of every public service now means our social security is in systems failure.

In the cold night in our shopping arcades, you can find newcomers “without recourse to public funds” forced to sleep rough. I’ve seen young men newly out of prison, released without any care for where they went. Last week, I met Anthony, who had been sleeping rough since he was heavily sanctioned by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and who had lost the fingers on one hand. I’ll never forget finding a disabled man when I was out with a team of volunteers – ashen grey, crying in pain, next to his wheelchair in an underpass that stank of urine. He’d been there for three days, still dressed in his hospital gown, with a tag on his wrist. It took us two hours to get him an ambulance.

This is the new normal. Especially at risk are those who grew up in our care system – like young Kane Walker, whom the Guardian featured this week. His death in January shocked our city. At his memorial service, homeless citizens lit candles in his memory.

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We cannot go on like this. But we cannot make homelessness history unless we confront the harsh realities of what’s happening. This is why I’m pressing for changes to the law. We urgently need what I’ve called Kane’s Law, to create a duty on public agencies, especially the DWP, the NHS, mental health services and the prison service to work with councils to prevent homelessness. We need reviews for everyone who dies homeless, so that the inconvenient truths of life and death cannot be ignored.

One of our region’s homelessness campaigners once said to me: “Remember, we’re not trying to get rid of ‘houselessness’. We’re trying to get rid of homelessness. A home is where you feel safe, warm, loved.” Compassion is still the greatest quality of this nation. We used it once to build a country where we all looked after each other. That is the mission around which good people must now unite, before hundreds more die on our streets.

• Liam Byrne is Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and former chief secretary to the Treasury