n early August, I boarded an almost empty train running up the north-east coast from Newcastle to Dundee, on my way to visit Eagles Wings Trust, a small homelessness and addiction charity doing important grassroots work in Scotland’s fourth-largest city. The homelessness crisis in Dundee, one of the UK’s poorest cities, seemed unchanged since my last visit to the charity in 2018. But the pandemic has forced a change to its usual work; the former evening soup kitchen and afternoon drop-in centre has been reduced to a daily food-bank service, with a clientele that is more diverse than ever. “[Since lockdown] we’ve had teachers and nurses in,” one volunteer told me as the queue started to build outside. “These are very challenging times for a lot of folk.” Across Britain, these conditions are set to get even tougher for many people. New figures paint a disturbing picture: some 20,000 households in England have been made homeless during the pandemic despite a nationwide eviction ban, itself due to run out on 20 September. New research from the charity Shelter suggests that one in 103 children will be homeless this Christmas. Combined with mass job losses and the scheduled end of the furlough scheme this autumn, these toxic factors risk plunging thousands into homelessness. The spectrum of those at risk includes people already struggling with exorbitant rents, as well as those who were previously just about managing before the pandemic, whose livelihoods evaporated almost overnight, leaving them thousands of pounds in arrears. And what of the people who were already homeless, before coronavirus? When Everyone In, the government’s rough sleeping emergency scheme, was announced in March, it at least had the benefit of decisiveness. Getting rough sleepers off the street and into safe and secure accommodation at the start of lockdown was heralded as an unequivocal success, with the UK government’s figures showing that local authorities had housed more than 14,000 people in England alone, even if the true number might have been just a third of that, according to sceptical experts. Still, this was something – a necessary piece of crisis management occasioned by extraordinary circumstances that showed that ending homelessness has always been a question of political will. For many who benefited, the scheme was no small thing; it offered the chance of somewhere stable to sleep and a square meal, as well as access to services under the same roof. So it seems inconceivable that rough sleeping could have actually increased at the same time its temporary eradication was being trumpeted. But that’s what new figures compiled by Streetlink, a service that connects rough sleepers with local outreach teams in England and Wales, show. Between April and June 2020, the service saw 16,976 “alerts” recorded, a 4% rise from January to March and a 36% increase from 2019. In London, those figures were even more pronounced: 4,277 people were sleeping rough between April and June this year, two thirds of whom were doing so for the first time, a 77% rise from the same period in 2019. Back in June, I spoke with a caseworker at a busy London-based charity who schooled me on how uncertain these numbers were, even prior to the pandemic. “Of the guests at our shelters, only 50% are verified by Chain [the multiagency database that records London’s rough sleepers],” he explained to me over the phone. “That shows how wide the problem is beyond the verified rough-sleeping population. The rest might be sofa surfing, or sleeping in parks or buses [and] just never showing up in any system at all.” There’s another set of questions that these recent findings raise. If providing shelter was so readily achievable, why has it taken the worst crisis in living memory to make it happen? And what happens next? It’s a question that can be applied to much of the government’s pandemic response. The furlough scheme, like Everyone In, staved off immediate disaster, but has cast uncertainty over the medium to long term for millions of people, not that you’d know it from the media’s deification of the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. Over the past few months the rhetoric has subtly shifted, to talk of weaning people off state dependency and back to the austerity-era language of “tough choices” and hard times. Many justifiably fear that homelessness will receive the same treatment: just another unfortunate inevitability in the new bruised and battered post-Covid Britain. What we are used to calling a homelessness crisis is now so prevalent that the word “homelessness” no longer paints an accurate picture. Not everyone who becomes homeless in the coming months will be forced into life on the streets. Indeed, many thousands of people will be living invisibly, beyond the official statistics and sporadic attention of the press. These “hidden homeless” live in overcrowded temporary accommodation, or rely on the contingent kindness of family and friends to keep a temporary roof over their heads. The charity Crisis estimates that there are more than 71,000 people sofa surfing at any one time in the UK, but here, too, there are gaps in what we can say with any clarity. Being hidden means just that. These are the people beyond the reach of any census, their circumstances unknown and, at least for now, unknowable. Perhaps the only certainty is that their numbers are set to swell beyond anything experienced before. My trip to Dundee gave an indication of what this upcoming invisibility crisis might look like. People from all walks of life, trying their best to navigate the tightrope between their old lives and a frighteningly uncertain future. This was not an inevitability. The housing crisis has been a slow-burning fact of British life for decades, and its continuing entrenchment is an indictment of successive governments. • Francisco Garcia is a London-based writer and journalist