The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep outside in the snow.

At least 320,000 people are homeless in Britain, according to research by the housing charity Shelter.

This amounts to a year-on-year increase of 13,000, a 4% rise, despite government pledges to tackle the crisis. The estimate suggests that nationally one in 200 people are homeless.

This isn’t Haiti or Bangladesh, it’s the UK. (It’s worse in the US. There are more homeless people here and we do less for them.)

Shelter says its figures, which include rough sleepers and people in temporary accommodation, are likely to be an underestimate of the problem as they do not capture people who experience “hidden” homelessness, such as sofa-surfers, and others living insecurely in sheds or cars, for example.

The bulk of those affected, 295,000, are in forms of temporary accommodation after being accepted as homeless by their local authority.

It is Shelter’s third annual analysis of homelessness. In 2016, it estimated there were 255,000 homeless people in England alone, a figure it subsequently adjusted to 294,000 for Britain. This rose to 307,000 in 2017.

Polly Neate, Shelter’s chief executive, said: “Due to the perfect storm of spiralling rents, welfare cuts and a total lack of social housing, record numbers of people are sleeping out on the streets or stuck in the cramped confines of a hostel room. We desperately need action now to change tomorrow for the hundreds of thousands whose lives will be blighted by homelessness this winter.”

Well, look on the bright side. Allowing a desperately poor underclass to form and swell is an easy way to keep the working class frightened and powerless. Nasty for them but nice for the ruling class.

Melanie Onn, the shadow housing minister, said: “It is appalling that enough people to fill a city the size of Newcastle will wake up this Christmas without a home. This is the outcome of eight years of austerity that even the United Nations say was designed to hurt the poor.”

If you hurt them enough, they’ll be afraid to organize.