No passer-by would have noticed the man huddled in a sleeping bag and mounds of blankets beside a church. We had to lift the catch on an iron gate to get to the side of the building. Four wheelie bins had been drawn up in a line behind these, to screen his sleeping spot from sight.  

But one of our team had long experience of the pattern of rough sleeping in the borough. She knew that here, in this concealed place, a man often bedded down to sleep. She skirted the furthest wheelie bin and the beam of her torch picked out his blue sleeping bag.

“We’re from the council,” she called out, taking care not to shine the light towards his face. “Are you alright? Do you need anything?”

Blinking, the man raised himself on one elbow, shook his head and muttered a non committal reply. He wanted to be left alone.

It was about 1am. In preceding days there had been torrential rain. The temperature had since dropped to freezing. 

The team from the local authority were counting people sleeping on local streets to collect data for the rough sleeping snapshot, which is published annually by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and independently verified by Homeless Link.

I was there to verify this borough’s count: to ensure it was well organised, followed established procedure and its tally was statistically robust.

Around 30 of the council’s staff volunteered to take part, many of whom were experienced in street outreach work. Two were local councillors; I found it encouraging that the borough’s elected representatives took a close interest in its homelessness services.

Just after midnight volunteers were given a briefing on who to include in the count - people bedded down for the night or clearly about to do so - and advice on safety.

Volunteers were split into teams of two, with at least one member with experience of street counts in each. They were given street maps with their routes plus lists of “hot spots” where people had been reported to be sleeping out.

By coincidence, the plunging temperature meant a Severe Weather Emergency Protocol had just been declared in London. Extra short-term accommodation had been secured and an outreach team had been out that morning trying to bring in people sleeping rough.

Windscreens had frosted over in cars lining the quiet streets as I set out with one of the teams. We walked down side streets, looked in stairwells around low-rise blocks of flats and in strips of land beside housing developments.

We threaded our way through alleyways piled with mattresses, discarded toys and household goods. We walked around a silent churchyard, whose solitary occupant was a man rolling a cigarette on a bench. Several times my companions flinched as they brushed dank cobwebs spun over gateways or railings.

We came across several large urban foxes but few people. No reported “hot spots” were occupied. These included shop fronts on busy roads; the team suspected that people making these reports had confused daytime street begging activity with rough sleeping. 

Our team was the first back: as verifier, my role was to speak to each team as they returned to the count headquarters, note their tally, check if each person counted met the definition to be included and ask if anything impeded their search.

Around 2am other teams began to arrive. One found a “bash” - cardboard folded into a rectangle with high sides to create a sleeping site - with a sleeping bag inside, but no one there. Another came across a sodden mattress beneath a makeshift lean-to, again deserted.

One group spotted a man lying asleep in a duvet with two vodka near-empty bottles nearby. This team included a nurse, who noticed his breathing was irregular, indicating a chest problem. She called an ambulance, whose crew identified the man as a patient who had discharged himself from a local hospital without telling staff. He was taken back to hospital.

Teams logged details of people they saw sleeping on the streets with the count coordinator; most were well known to them. Some had been through the asylum system. This was one of my takeaways from the experience: the deep granular knowledge of council staff about the street population in the community. My second takeaway was how they saw the person in each individual they described: their circumstances, their personality, their humanity.

Encouragingly, several people who were found sleeping out agreed to come in and spend the night in a hotel room rather than on the freezing street. Two such men were shivering in bedding in a coffee shop doorway. When others declined accommodation, details of their whereabouts were passed to another outreach team due to go out as the day began.

For now, it was still night. Volunteers recharged themselves by drinking tea from paper cups and eating mini packets of Malteasers or Kit Kats before heading home. Some outreach workers said it could take them an hour to wind down after finishing their work before they can sleep.   

The final team returned at 4.45am, having spent time with several men they found bedded down at a station. 

The banging of doors and hum of vacuum cleaners heralded the arrival of the civic centre’s office cleaners. I went through the tally with the count coordinator. We agreed on which individuals should and should not be included, and I was pleased to declare it a well-run count. The number of people recorded is confidential until the 2024 rough sleeping snapshot is published in February, but it is clear from other published data that rough sleeping has been rising.

It was 5.45am when I finally went to bed in a windowless room in a nearby hotel, exhausted. But I was dry, warm and safe. Before I succumbed to a deep sleep, I thought of the people who didn’t come in, cold and alone in the early hours of a freezing autumn morning.

• Greg Hurst is Director of Communications and Public Engagement at the Centre for Homelessness Impact

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