| This will be the last newsletter of the year. Thank you all for reading and we hope you have a very happy Christmas.
It's December and a man and his pregnant wife go door to door trying to find a place to sleep. Sound familiar? No, not Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem but a couple in 2017 in a town in the Midlands. The couple had not been able to secure accommodation anywhere other than a temporary night shelter.
This is just one of the stories told to Politics.co.uk when we visited a homeless centre in Northampton this week to talk to the people using the service. People like Michelle who has chronic fibromyalgia and had been turned down for Personal Independent Payments by the DWP.
At the start of the week, Channel 4 news told the story of Lindy, a 32 year old woman who had been sleeping rough in a tent and was found dead three weeks ago.
These stories are no longer unusual. Local newspapers across the country regularly report on the death of another homeless person. Homelessness is soaring - rough sleeping is up 134% since the Conservatives came to power and 78,000 children are stuck in temporary accommodation.
The government's response has been woeful. It's been far too slow to act and has still not acknowledged the part its own policies have played in forcing people onto the streets.
At PMQs on Wednesday, May was asked about the number of children who will be homeless this Christmas. The same day MPs on the Public Accounts Committee accused the government of complacency over the growing crisis. And so, you might have expected the prime minister to show a little compassion, regret even. This was her response:
"I think it's important for all those who heard her question to be aware of this. She talks of 2,500 children in Wandsworth are waking up homeless on Christmas Day. Anybody hearing that will assume what that means is that 2,500 children will be sleeping on our streets. It does not. It does not mean that."
No, it means they will be waking up in B&Bs, hostels and bedsits. Perhaps May thinks this is perfectly acceptable. No need to worry about children who have no secure home or a bedroom of their own, they're not on the streets so what's the problem?
In the 80s, 'cardboard box cities' were a familiar sight. Over the years, things improved. Homelessness still existed of course, but it was visibly reduced. That is no longer the case. Visit just about any town or city in the country and you will see people sleeping in doorways. Behind shops, on small patches of grass and even on roundabouts people are pitching up tents and sleeping in them. Cardboard box cities have been replaced with tent villages.
This has happened on the Conservatives' watch and it's up to them to deal with it. It's not good enough for the prime minister to shrug off questions by disputing the meaning of homelessness. Whether it's children living in bedsits or vulnerable adults living in tents, homelessness is real and happening all around us.
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