Homeless young people, unable to find beds in emergency hostels, are being given bus tickets to allow them to sleep on London’s night buses as the number of people sleeping rough in the capital soars, a leading homelessness charity has revealed.

New Horizon Youth Centre, a day centre in central London that tries to find emergency accommodation for vulnerable young people in crisis situations, said staff distributed bus tickets on a regular basis, and gave young people details about the best routes looping around the capital through the night, so they could have a safe place to sleep.

The charity is unable to help the growing numbers of young people to find emergency accommodation, a problem it attributes to rising rents, a reduction in the number of hostel places, reductions in benefit payments, and changes in the ways local authorities fund hostels, obliging young people to have a local connection to be eligible for a place.

In four years, the number of people sleeping rough in London has more than doubled, according to research by St Mungo’s, another homelessness charity in the capital , and government data suggests rough sleeping across England has risen by 55% since 2010.



Research undertaken by the sector indicates that the number of bed spaces in hostels in England has fallen by 10% over four years, and more than half of homelessness services have had their funding cut.

Shelagh O’Connor, the director of the New Horizon Youth Centre, said in 2010, the organisation would have been able to find emergency beds for everyone who came for help, but now they were able to help only about 50%.

About half the people the charity is not able to help would then have to sleep rough. The rest would return to sleeping on the floor of a bedroom where there are three or four other people, find space in a squat, share someone else’s hostel room, or move into a tent in a park, O’Connor said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The YMCA says nine out of 10 of its centres in England has a waiting list or had to turn people away last year. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Bus tickets are given when every other avenue has been exhausted “because they are safer riding buses than on the streets”, O’Connor said. “We tell them which routes to choose, so that they will be travelling around all night. They come back in the morning and have some cereal and a shower.”

Staff also have a supply of sleeping bags to give to young people when they cannot find them beds. “We wouldn’t have had to do that in 2010. We would have got them into an emergency hostel,” she said.

“It is a dire situation. It has never been as bad as this; I am extremely worried. It is so difficult at the moment and I can’t see any new strategies being put in place that might improve the situation. We are all aware of the dearth of accommodation in London and spiralling rents.”

In the summer, staff gave bus tickets to a homeless student so she would have somewhere relatively safe to stay before she took her exams. “She rode the buses and went in and did her A-levels. You have to admire her determination,” O’Connor said.

Two of the eight main housing providers the charity works with have taken preemptive action and announced that they no longer want to house under-21s, aware that plans to cut housing benefit for 18- to 21-year-olds are set to be implemented in 2017.

The charity has called on the government to remove the local connection rules that restrict hostels to providing accommodation for people who come from those areas.

A concerted government policy from the late 1990s onward successfully reduced the number of street homeless, but charities have noticed a worsening of the situation in recent years.

The YMCA said nine out of 10 of their centres in England had a waiting list or had to turn people away last year. The key problem was the difficulty in finding affordable places for current residents to move on to.

Denise Hatton, the chief executive of YMCA England, said: “It is becoming increasingly challenging for individuals to find somewhere to move on to after supported accommodation. In a recent study conducted by YMCA England, more than half (56%) of supported accommodation residents surveyed felt they were ready to move on from YMCA but were currently unable to do so. In addition, one in five said they had been ready and looking for somewhere to move on to for more than six months.”

O’Connor said: “In the past five years, the emergency places available for young people has become very restricted. My fear is that we are creating a situation where 18- to 25-year-olds are going back to the streets. This is not a cost-effective solution, because when people are rough sleeping, prey to everything on the streets, in the end that costs us more as a society – in terms of physical and mental health and young people becoming involved in criminal activity, ending up in the criminal justice system, taking up substance abuse.”

Figures on statutory homelessness released by the Department for Communities and Local Government on Thursday reveal that 13,850 new households were accepted as being homeless in England between 1 April and 30 June 2015 – an increase of 5% over the same quarter of 2014.

If faced with the loss of their home, any household can apply to their local authority for acceptance for housing assistance. A household is considered homeless if it no longer has a legal right to occupy their accommodation, or if it would no longer be reasonable to continue to live there – for example, if living there would lead to violence against them.