Conservative housing spokesperson Geoffrey Clifton-Brown has asked the National Audit Office to conduct a public inquiry into the rough sleepers unit homeless count last November.
Clifton-Brown said he wrote to the NAO after receiving information from homelessness charities claiming the unit’s methodology and tactics during the rough sleepers count were unsound. He said he was also unhappy with the "unsatisfactory answers" he got in parliament concerning the matter.
He said: "There needs to be an inquiry to see if these figures have been artificially massaged down."
The unit's figures revealed a 71 per cent decrease in the number of rough sleepers in England from 1,850 in 1998 to just 532 people.
Clifton-Brown added the accusations of manipulating the figures had been made by a number of independent charities with no axe to grind against the government.
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