Yesterday I got stopped twice on the same street. Once by a homeless man asking for change. Once by an interviewer asking what I thought about the UK following Hungary's lead and criminalising rough sleeping. That those two conversations happened back to back tells you everything.

No human being deserves to be on the streets. Punishing them for being there is not policy. It is cowardice dressed up as order.

What Hungary did

Hungary wrote a ban on "habitual residence in a public space" into its constitution in 2018. Police can move people on, confiscate their belongings, fine them, and jail them if they cannot pay. At the time, Hungary had around 20,000 rough sleepers and roughly 11,000 shelter beds. They criminalised an impossibility.

What the UK has flirted with

The UK has flirted with the same logic for years. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 is still technically in force. The Criminal Justice Bill 2024 tried to bring in fines up to £2,500 and prison terms for "nuisance rough sleeping," with the definition stretching to anyone who looks like they might sleep rough. It stalled before the election. The pressure to revive it has not gone away.

The actual numbers

Meanwhile, the actual numbers:

• A record 4,667 people slept rough on a single night in England in autumn 2024, up 20 percent in a year and 164 percent since 2010. The Oct-Dec 2025 quarterly snapshot has since hit 4,841, another record.
• 134,210 households are in temporary accommodation, including 176,130 children, both record highs.
• Social housing waiting lists are approaching 1.34 million households. In parts of London the wait is over ten years.
• Around 80 percent of people experiencing homelessness in England report a mental health issue.
• Crisis calls it a "normalised emergency." They are right.

This is not a policing problem. It is a government and society failure, and fining the symptom does nothing to the cause.

The part nobody likes saying

Some of the people asking for change on the street are not homeless. Organised begging is real, and every tenner handed to someone with a flat to go home to means the next genuinely homeless person gets ignored. The fakes take money. They also take trust. The public, worn down, walks past human beings like street furniture.

Charities are not all clean either. Some put almost every pound into frontline work. Others run glossy campaigns, pay executives six figures, and publish accounts you need a forensic accountant to follow. People have a right to know exactly where their donation lands.

What should actually happen

Before anyone reaches for handcuffs:

• Build social homes at the scale the waiting list demands, and vet allocations so they go to those who truly cannot house themselves, not those gaming the system.
• Fund mental health and addiction support, because you cannot fine someone out of psychosis.
• Run awareness campaigns so people know who to call when they see someone in a doorway.
• Force transparency on every organisation taking donations in the name of the homeless.
• Break up organised begging so genuine need stops being drowned in noise.

You fix the system. You do not punish the people the system broke.

Correct me if I am wrong.

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Sources

• Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (2025). Rough sleeping snapshot in England: autumn 2024. gov.uk.
• Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (2026). Statutory homelessness in England: October to December 2025. gov.uk.
• Shelter England (2025). 650 social homes lost in England last year, while 1.34m households are stuck on waiting lists. shelter.org.uk.
• Crisis (2025). Rough sleeping in the capital now a "normalised emergency" as numbers reach record highs. crisis.org.uk.
• Homeless Link (2025). Unhealthy State of Homelessness 2025. homeless.org.uk.
• House of Commons Library (2024). Criminal Justice Bill: progress of the Bill. CBP-10022. commonslibrary.parliament.uk.
• Vagrancy Act 1824 (still technically in force as of 2026). legislation.gov.uk.
• European Commission (2018). The criminalisation of rough sleeping in Hungary. ec.europa.eu.