The Hidden Homeless - A Hallam FM News Special
We've uncovered figures which show homelessness has almost doubled in Doncaster - but what about those who aren't recorded in the official figures? We investigate.
We've uncovered figures which show the number of homeless people in Doncaster has almost doubled over the last year.
According to the latest official figures from this March, during the last financial year (2014/2015) the council accepted 235 people as being homeless.
The year before it was 117.
Elsewhere in South Yorkshire the number's gone down.
But charities here and nationally have told Hallam we'll never know the real number of people who have nowhere to live, with some warning it's also likely to get worse.
This week we're looking into the hidden homeless - the people who don't show up in Government statistics.
Our Chief Reporter Laura Pennington has the first in a series of exclusive reports:
We've spoken to people sofa-surfing, sleeping under bridges and in bins and those camping outside, as well as the volunteers and organisations who support them.
"The figures are completely skewed in my opinion. There are so many people out there who are living in friend's flats, sofa-surfing, lying on floors and they're never picked up." Graham Bostock, Emmaus Sheffield
"It's quite terrifying. I think it's growing. I think the figure's probably getting bigger. I think we'll never really know the true picture to be honest." Fran Ockwell, Nomad
"We have about 60 or 70 people come through our doors three monrings a week. The actual number of homeless is perhaps 5 to 10% but then we don't get to hear all about it. We just get the extreme cases of people sleeping in a park or on benches." Jonathan Lang, Shiloh Homeless Drop-in Rotherham
"It's very worrying that a fiftth of young people had to sofa surf in the last year because they had nowhere else to go. That just shows the potential scale of this problem across the country." Jenny Barnes, Centrepoint
"That's why it's called hidden homeless - it's incredibly difficult to count. Equally people come and go into and away from hidden homeless. There's a core which stays for a long time, but it really is difficult to count." Tim Renshaw, Sheffield's Cathedral Archer Project
"I think if you were to ask different people how many people are homeless in Barnsley you'd get very different answers." Michelle Robertson, Barnsley Churches Drop-in