According to the Government, there are just 15 people sleeping rough across the West Midlands. Officially there are 6 persons sleeping rough in Birmingham and absolutely no-one across Warwickshire.

Is this yet another case of the Govenment fiddling the statistics? Yes I think it is. After all it wouldn´t be the first thing that the Government has lied about. Take for example the unemployment figures. The Prime Minister may well claim that the Labour Government has reduced the number of unemployed which in my view is rubbish.

To the powers that be, we are just numbers. Social standing, character and circumstances are unimportant, each of us is a number and each with a paper trail many miles long. All of us numbers appear on many different lists. For instance, you could be on a list for council tax, car tax, mortgage payments, catologue payments. You could be a student or you could be unemployed.

What they like to do with unemployment figures is to alter them so that the list appears shorter. They might move a few numbers from the unemployment list onto a Training Course list. Those numbers are still unemployed yet if you are enrolled on a ´Training Course´ or such you are deemed to be doing something productive. Whether or not this is the case is unimportant, what is most important is that it LOOKS as though the uneployment figures are down and that makes the Government LOOK good.

Same thing goes for those who are homeless, except that these people have no paper trail, they´re out of the loop which means that it is difficult to come up with accurate figures...

But when was that ever an issue.

The estimate is that there are just 15 people actually living on the street not the total number of homeless. However, if this is the most accurate figure they can come up with I´d say they´re not looking hard enough. In Birmingham alone there have been counts of at least 10 - 25 people on the streets and 10 - 20 in Leamington Spa. That´s already well over the Governments official figures and those are numbers are from just two cities.

When did the Government carry out their count? Did some official have a quick look down the high street before buggering off? ´Yeah fifteen.. that sounds about right. I saw a cat sleeping in a doorway.. that´s almost like a human, four limbs, head, won´t worry so much about the fur and the tail.´