Like most people who find themselves homeless, Lee Davies, a 24-year-old from Plymouth who now sleeps rough in London, was kicked out of his home due to the end of an assured-shorthold tenancy. The most recent government statistics show that a third of all households in England made homeless, 40% in London, were due to a landlord ending a tenancy – up from 11% of all cases in 2009. With the rise of private renting, the precarity of the tenure has been reflected in the cases councils see in their homelessness applications.

When Davies approached his local authority for help finding accommodation, he found little sympathy: on one occasion, he was informed that as a single young man he was low priority; on another advised to rent another property, despite the fact he had no money for a deposit; and on a third visit, told he was “intentionally homeless” because he could have found somewhere else to live after his landlord had given him notice. Finally, he gave up, relying on friends’ sofas – but eventually his friends’ patience ran out.

At that point, he found a novel way of finding places to sleep. “If I went on Grindr, I could meet men who had their own flats and offer to spend the night with them. Then I could have a shower, charge my phone, and go out,” he tells me. “I didn’t like some of the guys, but the alternative was sleeping in shop doorways, so it was all about weighing up the pros and cons.”

But then Davies’s phone was stolen and this lifeline was cut off. Now he has no way to contact friends and family, and sleeps rough in central London. “At least when I could still get online, I could pretend this was temporary and that everything was fine; but now no one knows where I am, and if they wanted to find me, they couldn’t.” He has bruises on his neck, from a few nights ago when he slept in a doorway near a cashpoint and a drunk man in a suit kicked him repeatedly while swearing at him.

Davies’s situation is not unique, and is becoming increasingly common. The government’s most recent figures, from autumn 2015, estimate that there are 3,569 rough sleepers on any one night in England – more than double the number in autumn 2010, when it was 1,768. And sources told the Observer this month that this year’s count, which has only just finished, is likely to be higher again.

In cities around the country, homelessness has increased visibly, with many more people on the streets. The highest rates of rough sleeping are in Westminster, Bristol and Brighton and Hove, the government’s figures suggest. Manchester has the fourth highest rate of street homelessness and Adam Williams, office manager at Barnabus, a Christian homelessness charity in Manchester, says the number of people requesting their services has never been higher than this year. “People are visibly affected when they visit Manchester at the moment, especially if they haven’t been here for a few years. However, my fear is that people will become desensitised to the situation [so many people sleeping rough] and that within a year it will just become a normal state of affairs in most people’s eyes,” he says.

Howard Sinclair, chief executive of homelessness charity St Mungo’s, concurs with Williams. “This year saw an alarming rise in the number of people who are facing the extreme dangers of sleeping rough.”

In winter, sleeping rough can mean death: the average age of death for a homeless woman is 43, for a homeless man 46

The charity’s report on homelessness earlier this year, Stop the Scandal, identified multiple reasons why rough sleeping remains a stubborn problem, even though all street homeless people should have access to a shelter. A lack of specialist mental health provision was the main issue raised: four out of 10 people who homelessness workers came into contact with had at least one mental health problem, yet 86% reported a lack of beds for people with mental health issues. Causes include funding cuts, services disappearing entirely, and rough sleepers with both mental health problems and substance abuse histories finding it nearly impossible to access services.

The report calculates that on average, local authority funding for services for helping vulnerable people avoid homelessness was cut by 45% between 2009-10 and 2014-15. Last week’s local government finance settlement is unlikely to inspire confidence in the sector – the Local Government Association estimates that councils face a £5.8bn funding gap by 2020.

In winter, sleeping rough can easily mean death: the average age of death for a homeless woman is 43, and for a homeless man 46, compared with a national average of 77. Last month, an unidentified homeless man was found dead behind Birmingham New Street station. In the same month, Birmingham council announced it was cutting £10m from the £24m Supporting People budget, designed to help homeless and vulnerable people.

Birmingham’s decision is symptomatic of the funding crisis facing local authorities. Persistent cuts to housing-related budgets by Oxford county council have led several homelessness charities in the area to warn they will be forced to close shelters without funding. Volunteers can only plug the gap partially: without targeted funding, it becomes impossible to run effective homelessness services.

Once people end up sleeping rough, it is extremely difficult to gain access to housing: Davies cannot work or claim benefits as he has no fixed address and he does not have the identification documents to apply for a simple payment card, can’t contact friends without turning up on their doorsteps and tells me he feels he “has completely dropped out of society”, whereas before he had a low-paid job, but a home and a small social safety net.

Bill Jenkins, a 38-year old, has been street homeless for two years after leaving his home when he broke up with his wife. When the council told him he wasn’t a priority, he “lost it, thought I’d ruined my entire life, just drank all day to calm myself down and have been sleeping rough since.” He feels that sleeping rough is an insurmountable obstacle to re-entering society and getting his life back on track.

Last week, the Labour party said it would double the number of housing association homes earmarked for rough sleepers in a bid to tackle the problem. And across the border from England, there may be a solution. The Welsh approach to homelessness focuses on prevention rather than forcing households to wait until they are homeless before being entitled to help, and does not deprioritise single young people like Davies: if Lee were in Wales, it’s highly unlikely he’d be sleeping in a telephone box each night.

Jon Sparkes, chief executive of Crisis, is wholly enthusiastic about the approach, which the current homelessness reduction bill seeks to bring to English local authorities. “Prevention is better than cure, and for homeless people this is especially so. It has already been shown to work in Wales, where it has dramatically reduced the need for people to be rehoused and helped to reduce the amount councils spend on temporary accommodation. We now need similar change in England,” he says.

With cross-party support and, crucially, the financial backing to enact the policy’s aims, the homelessness reduction bill could make a real difference, although the Local Government Association, and former housing ministers Mark Prisk and John Healey, have warned that without millions of pounds of funding from central government, the aims of the bill cannot be realised. Davies’s immediate situation looks bleak, but he remains positive: “I’m still young, and some people have offered help purely because it’s Christmas. I’m spending Christmas weekend in a hostel, and they’ve got advisers there, so I want to see if I can get back on track, and back into the system. Get my life back, really.”

Some names have been changed