The death rate among homeless people in Brighton and Hove is one of the highest in the country according to new figures.
And the annual death toll for the past eight years was higher only in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds and Bristol.
An estimated 82 homeless people dies over the past eight years, from 2013 to 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The figure for last year was 13, despite the government’s “everyone in” policy of trying to ensure all rough sleepers were given emergency housing from the start of the first coronavirus lockdown.
The ONS said that the figures mainly included those sleeping rough or living in emergency housing, based on registered deaths, plus an estimate of how many people died without being correctly identified as homeless.
The annual rough sleeper count in the autumn of 2020 recorded just 27 homeless people in Brighton and Hove, a significant reduction on some estimates in recent years.
Nationally, almost nine out of ten homeless people who died were men and two in five died as a result of drugs while more than a dozen died with covid-19.
The figures for the past eight years include some deaths from the year before because of delays in registering them and delays may have been exacerbated since the start of the pandemic.
There are concerns that this could mean a higher number of deaths than reported.
The ONS also said that the government’s “everyone in” policy had meant that, with many homeless people in places such as hotels, it had been harder to identify them in mortality records.
But along with the temporary ban on eviction, the policy may have contributed to a decrease in the homeless population nationally.
The average age of death remained in the forties for homeless men and women, many of whom were suffering from drink, drug or mental health problems.
