As camping spots go, the scrap of shrubland by the dual-lane ringway at the back of Manchester Arena is not the most serene. To reach the tents during the morning rush hour, Colin Morrison has to dart between impatient cars and then make his way gingerly through a bush. “Hello,” he shouts, above the traffic noise. He wanders around two big tents, picking his way through the detritus: a sanitary towel, toilet roll, a sodden deerstalker hat and a child’s buggy filled with rubbish.

There is no answer in the blue tent, so he tries the orange one next door. It is family-size and new. He has not seen it before on his regular rounds as an outreach worker for Manchester city council. “Is anyone in there? It’s the council,” he bellows, shaking the canvas. All the zips are fastened, including the flysheet.

“It’s only a matter of time before I find someone dead in one of these,” he says, matter-of-factly. In January fire officers made exactly that grim discovery, when the beaten and charred body of 23-year-old Daniel Smith was found in a tent near railway arches over the river Irwell in Salford.

Morrison decides to open the tent on Trinity Way, keeping his head as far from his hand as possible in case the occupants lash out. “Fuck off!” shouts a man within. A second slurred male voice tells Morrison to go away. Morrison decides to leave them be but warns them loudly that he will be back later to have a chat.

A short while later Morrison attempts to wake another pair. They are camping in a flimsy festival tent by the Roman ruins in the Castlefield heritage park, with a soggy welcome mat festering by the front porch. He doesn’t like what he sees or smells inside: he’s known the woman in the couple for more than a decade and she cheerfully admits she and her partner have been sterilising their needles with lemon juice rather than going to the needle exchange.

For more than 20 years, Morrison has been working with Manchester’s homeless, but “it’s worse than I’ve ever seen it”, he says. Most mornings he starts work at 7am and does a round of the city centre. He looks behind industrial bins at the back of upmarket shops and in the covered doorways of £1,000-a-month studios to see who has been sleeping where overnight.

Crouching behind a delivery van in an alley off St Ann’s Square, a grubby-faced man cheerily says hello but adds that he can’t talk. “I’m ’avin me breakfast,” he says, heating a scrap of foil for his morning heroin hit.

A homeless man finds refuge outside a branch of McDonald’s in Manchester city centre. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

According to the council’s annual rough sleeper count, nearly twice as many people are sleeping on the streets of Manchester as last year. Seventy people were counted in one night in December, compared with 43 on the same evening in 2014. There were just 10 in 2011.

Walk around the city centre on a Friday or Saturday night and you’d think the problem was even worse than the reality. Morrison estimates that for the 20 or 30 beggars you may see on the Deansgate thoroughfare on the weekend, or in the Northern Quarter nightlife district, a maximum of 10 are homeless, with the others “sofa surfing” or in precarious accommodation.

They can easily earn £200 a night, he says, much of which is spent on drugs or alcohol. It’s not a lifestyle choice, he insists. “If you are sitting on the cold ground, begging, you are not going home to a nice house to live it up on the hundreds of pounds you have made that day,” he says.

The reasons for the rise are complex, says officer Jenny Osborne, the local authority’s strategic lead for adult public health: “There’s a number of factors coming in to play: we have an increase in EU nationals with no recourse to public funds, and we’re seeing the cumulative impact of welfare reform. For example, benefit sanctions and particularly how they are applied to young people, and the conditionality of the benefits system, which requires jobseekers to spend their days searching for jobs on the internet or face sanctions.”

Bed Streetlife Project volunteers giving Sunday morning breakfasts to homeless people living on the city centre streets in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The introduction of the bedroom tax has also played a role: 8,000 individuals in Manchester are classed as “under-occupying” their properties, Osborne says, and yet there is nowhere for them to downsize to, given a catastrophic shortage of one-bedroom flats.

Since 2012, anyone single under-35 receives only enough housing benefit for a room in house-share – not a realistic option for those with mental health and substance misuse problems. Osborne is braced for a rise in April 2017, when under-21s will be prevented from claiming housing benefit. Claimants will be entrusted with all their benefits when universal credit kicks in – another disaster waiting to happen, says Morrison.

The availability of cheap tents has exacerbated the problem, says Morrison. The biggest Manchester camp – of more than a dozen tents and washing lines hung between guy-ropes – is a minute’s walk from Piccadilly station. This miserable mini-shanty town provides an uncomfortable welcome to the city anointed the centre of the government’s shiny “northern powerhouse”.

A homeless camp opposite a luxury hotel, near Piccadilly station in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Last April, the first really visible homeless camp was set up in the city centre, after a protest outside the town hall in Albert Square. For months right into the autumn, a ragtag of protesters, together with what the council calls “genuine” rough sleepers, played a grim game of cat and mouse with the authorities, setting up camp in various prominent locations, including outside the recently restored Central Library, where they made headlines after being stopped from using the loos.

The city’s homelessness crisis went global in October, when the former Manchester United star Gary Neville allowed a group of squatters, some homeless, to spend the winter inside the city’s old stock exchange building, which he was planning to develop into a luxury hotel.

The city’s visible homelessness problem jars with its self-projected image of prosperity: glitzy shops and nightclubs, ever more cranes building multimillion-pound penthouses on the horizon, supercars parked brazenly on double yellow lines outside restaurants by footballers and sheikhs who earn the fine in a minute.

The stock exchange building in Manchester, where owner Gary Neville gave squatters permission to stay over winter. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

On Morrison’s morning round, we pass a former squaddie sleeping in the main entrance to a department store. It is Billy Gage, who last year hit the local media after complaining about being urinated on and spat at while sleeping rough. Coronation Street stars offered their support but, three months on, Gage still does not have a roof over his head – unless you count the porch of Debenhams.

On the steps at the back of the cathedral is an Eritrean man caught in limbo after being refused asylum yet unable to return home. He sits quietly, surrounded by donations from the public: a pack of razors atop a six-pack of Tango, and a sausage and egg butty from Tescos for breakfast.



So many voluntary groups in the city are undertaking soup and curry runs that no homeless person in Manchester is expected to go hungry in 2016, according to experts. But while such acts of kindness are welcomed by Morrison and Osborne, they gently argue that the public’s generosity exacerbates the problem. They ask wellwishers not to donate food or money and instead give to the Big Change campaign.

“The street lifestyle is more sustainable than it used to be,” says Osborne. “Twenty years ago, when you think about cardboard cities etc, there weren’t tents, there weren’t high-quality sleeping bags that meant people had a chance of staying warm and dry, therefore it was perhaps easier to work with people to come inside.

“Members of the public are giving and trying to help, but it’s not necessarily helping people to move away from the streets. We know that’s ultimately the only way they are going to sort their issues out.”

An empty building with a ‘House the Homeless’ written on the windows. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

• This article was amended on 10 March 2016. Jenny Osborne is not a councillor, but an officer. This article was also amended because an earlier version said 8,000 individuals in Manchester were classed by Osborne as “over-occupying” their properties, when “under-occupying” was meant.

