THE charity Shelter, in its report “This is England... a picture of homelessness in 2019” classed no less than 2,876 individuals as being homeless in Brighton, a figure that vastly outnumbers the council’s own estimate of just 54.

I assume that this vast difference was why Andy Winter, the chief executive of Brighton Housing Trust, put inverted commas around the word homeless, when referring to Shelter’s number in his article (The Argus, December 21), because that word means very different things to different organisations; for example the council uses it to describe just rough sleepers, whereas Shelter includes not only the street community but everyone else who is without the benefit of a permanent home, such as those living in hostels, in bed and breakfast lodgings and various other forms of temporary accommodation.

The problem with using the word homeless to describe both groups distorts the situation; the rough sleepers, while only comprising two per cent of Shelter’s, get all the public media attention, whereas the other 98 per cent fall into a group that, I believe, can be fairly described as “the hidden homeless”.

For example, Iif I carried out a survey on Brighton’s Western Road, asking passers-by what the word meant to them, the vast majority would, almost certainly, reply along the lines of “people sleeping in shop doorways” or “people living in tents on the city’s streets”, while I could probably count on one hand those mentioning the people that Shelter included in its survey, something which I find quite sad.

So many people without a home to call their own and, even sadder, folk who are not only homeless but, to a great degree, virtually forgotten about by both the media and the public.

Eric Waters, Lancing