Social Issues Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

Social Issues - Essay Example This was however refuted by the campaign group Crisis, which warns that people are merely moving from the streets into temporary shelters and then moving back onto the streets again (www.bbc.co.uk, 2001). Recent statistics reveal that there may be still be vast numbers of homeless people still populating UK’s streets. In evaluating the trends over time, about two thirds of homeless people in general were single persons over the age of 25 rather than members with families. In England, the number of people recognized officially as being homeless in the year 2007 was 99,500, and this revealed a decreasing trend. The current figure was half of what the figures were in the year 2004 and well below the high numbers that existed a decade ago(www.crisis.org.uk). Similar trends were not however, reported in Wales and Scotland. In the case of the fomer, the number of households recognized as officially newly homeless were 9300, which is an increase from the values of 2004. The homelessness trend has been fluctuating in Wales, it rose sharply from 2001 to 2004, then dropped sharply up to 2007 when it registered another increase. An increasing trend was also displayed in Scotland; the num ber of households which were categorized as newly homeless were 41,00 which are actually a third higher than they were a decade ago. Most people have little sympathy for homeless people, because they believe that these individuals deliberately choose to adopt this option so that they can scrounge off the sympathy and assistance of kindly folk. But as was pointed out in the BBC news item cited above, homelessness is like a vicious cycle because it creates its own set of problems. The failure to be able to demonstrate the existence of a permanent address means that such individuals are also not able to get jobs to earn money for themselves, which in turn, only leads to a higher incidence of homelessness.