Making the homeless count? Enumerating rough sleepers and the distortion of homelessness

This article traces the power of numbers in discourses relating to homeless ness in Britain. It argues that enumeration has played a formative role in the recording of homelessness as a 'problem', and in the public policy resp onse to homelessness in specific locations. In particular, the use of rough sleeper counts as popular defining representations of the problem of, and response to, homelessness is analysed in terms of their wider pivotal signi ficance in political and policy discourses relating to homeless people. The article concludes that how rough sleeper counts are undertaken has clear d istorting consequences for the identification and understanding of to what extent, where, and among whom homelessness represents a pressing social iss ue. Discursive valorisation of enumeration needs to be interconnected criti cally with other more qualitative forms of knowledge drawing on the experie nce of housing officers, local agency workers and others dealing with local ised homelessness on a day-today basis.