For some time, those who deal with homelessness have been telling us that the problem is getting worse. They point to the scarcity of local authority housing, to the overcrowding of hostels and to rising rents in the private sector, as factors which leave increasing numbers of people without a roof over their heads.
More recent years have seen the appearance on the streets of young men and women wrapped in blankets and sleeping in doorways - images which many had thought belonged more properly to the Britain of Margaret Thatcher. Even the Simon Community has expressed surprise at the number of people it found sleeping rough in a one-week survey last December - and the public must surely be surprised at the proportion of teenagers, some very young, among that number.
In a separate development, the Children's Court was told last week that one 14-year-old boy has been living on the streets for nearly a year. The court heard that he has a mental age of eight. He is currently in the care of St Michael's Assessment and Remand Centre pending another court appearance next week.
The sad reality is, there is nothing new about the courts having to remand children on sometimes trivial charges because there is no service to which they can send them for help. How many of those children have ended up on the streets over the years? And when they did, was it a case of out of sight, out of mind, as far as the social services were concerned?
There is a growing inevitability about children ending up on the streets. It is only a few weeks since the Government told the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that it could not raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 because the social services would be unable to cope with the number of children who need help. This is a stark admission of failure by the State. It is also an admission of culpability. The State has failed to invest in preventive care, is allowing residential care to die out and will not provide sufficient social workers to recruit and train foster families to the numbers required.
We need better quality work with families and a programme of intervention in the schools where teachers have a good chance of knowing which of the five-years-olds sitting in front of them are likely to end up in trouble. We also need a top-class foster care system, and a residential care system that can help those children who have to leave their families but who foster families are unable to cope with. We need to do these things now. We can afford to do them now - and, many would argue, we cannot afford not to do them now.