The Winter Count

The count happens on a single night in November, between midnight and four, across a defined area, by volunteers in pairs.

It produces one number, which goes into a national statistic, which determines funding.

Priya has run the count for this borough for nine years and has never once believed the number.

Why the number is wrong

Because you cannot count people who do not want to be found, and the people who most need counting are the best at not being found.

Because the methodology counts people "sleeping rough," which means visibly bedded down at the moment of the count, which excludes anyone who is walking to keep warm, riding a night bus, sitting in an A&E waiting room, or in a stairwell behind a door.

Because a single night in November is weather-dependent, and in a hard frost more people accept a shelter place and the count goes down, and a lower count means less money, which means fewer shelter places, which means next year's count goes up.

Priya has explained this to four journalists. Two understood it.

Why she does it anyway

Because the alternative to a flawed number is no number.

She says this at the volunteer briefing every year, in the same words, because she has watched what happens to a service when the count comes back low and there is nothing to argue with.

The briefing

Forty volunteers in a church hall at eleven at night. Two-thirds are new; the turnover is enormous and Priya stopped taking it personally in about 2019.

The rules:

You do not wake anybody. Ever. If a person is asleep, you observe, you record, you move on.

You do not approach alone.

You do not offer anything you cannot deliver. If somebody asks you for a bed and there is no bed, you say there is no bed.

You do not ask names.

And the one that always causes a hand to go up: you count what you see, not what you infer. If there is a sleeping bag with a shape in it, you count one. If there is a sleeping bag with no shape in it, you count zero, and you write it in the notes, and it does not go in the number.

The hand goes up every year. Somebody always says: but there's obviously a person, they've just gone to the shop.

Priya says: yes. Count zero. Write it in the notes.

The notes

The notes are the part nobody outside the sector knows about.

The number goes to the government. The notes stay with the borough, and they are where the actual intelligence lives: the empty bags, the doorways that were occupied last year and are not this year, the new sites, the site behind the retail park that has grown from two to nine in four years.

Priya's notes from nine counts run to about four hundred pages and are the single most useful document the outreach team has, and they exist because of a rule that exists to make the official number defensible.

This year

Cold but not freezing. Four degrees. Dry, which matters more than temperature.

Priya walked the north sector with a volunteer called Josh, twenty-three, first count, who had done the training and had asked good questions and who was, she could tell within about twenty minutes, going to be one of the ones who comes back.

They counted eleven in three hours.

At the multi-storey they found a man in a bag against the stairwell wall, asleep, and stood at a distance and recorded him, and Josh said, very quietly, "Should we—"

"No."

"He's—"

"I know," said Priya. "Outreach have this site. They'll be here at seven. He's on the list."

Josh looked at her.

"He's on the list," she said again, and they moved on, and she has said that sentence perhaps four hundred times in nine years and has never once said it without her chest doing something.

At the fourth site

A woman, awake, sitting up in a doorway on Carman Street, who saw them coming and said, before they got there: "Counting?"

Priya said yes.

The woman said, "Go on then."

And then she said, "There's two more round the back of the bins. They'll not come out. Put them down."

Priya said she couldn't, and explained why — count what you see — and the woman listened to all of it and said: "That's stupid."

"It is," said Priya.

"So put them down."

"I'll put them in the notes."

The woman looked at her for a while.

"Does anyone read the notes?"

The number

The borough's count this year was sixty-one.

Priya's professional estimate of the true figure on that night is somewhere between ninety and a hundred and ten.

The report goes in on the fourteenth. It will say sixty-one, because sixty-one is what was seen, and because a count that is inflated by inference is a count that can be dismissed entirely, and a count that can be dismissed is worth nothing.

The notes run to fifty-one pages this year.

In the notes, under Carman Street, there is an entry that reads:

Two reported behind bins, not visible, not counted. Reported by W., same doorway as 2023 and 2024. She asked whether anyone reads the notes.

Answer

Four people read the notes.

Priya, who writes them. The outreach coordinator, who works from them all year. A commissioning manager at the council who has read every page since 2021 and who has twice moved money because of them.

And, since March, a woman called Winnie who sleeps in a doorway on Carman Street and who asked, and who Priya went back and found, and who now gets a copy.