'I'm ignored probably for 95 per cent of the day...'

HARRY LEACH was shocked by the number of homeless on our streets. he stopped to find out how some of them got there...

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I WAS walking through Birmingham city centre on one of those mornings when the temperature numbs your skin, when something hit me harder than the cold: the shocking number of rough sleepers lining our streets.

A man wrapped in a thin blanket on the doorstep of Primark on the High Street. A young woman curled up inside two sleeping bags outside New Street station. Three men huddled together, bags of clothes at their feet, sharing the final drags of a fading cigarette.

Being the UK's Second City, it's statistically likely that we will see vulnerable people walking our streets with nowhere to call home. But between 8.40am and 9.30am, walking from Centenary Square to Moor Street, I lost count.

I'd never seen rough sleeping on that scale before. Maybe I was just paying closer attention. Or maybe the problem is bigger than most of us feel comfortable admitting.

You'll have heard the comments before that homeless people 'always have somewhere to stay'; that they're sleeping in the freezing cold 'by choice' ; that they beg because it's an 'easy' way to make money.

For the most part, they're lazy assumptions that don't consider the multitude of reasons of why someone might end up on the street in the first place.

That narrative especially shattered for me the moment I stepped into St Martin's Queensway tunnel. For a space you can walk end-to-end in under a minute, it was shocking to see so many people sleeping rough.