Ms Mary Hayes:

It is important to understand the way the rough sleeper count is constructed. The point for us is that we are trying to identify the people we need to work with; the people who need emergency accommodation. We do the count to plan the numbers who would take up emergency accommodation if it was available - those who are part of the Housing First approach. When we see repeat people who are out, the chronic people who will not take up a bed or who we see on repeated counts, they automatically become part of our cohort for Housing First. That is why we do rough sleeper counts and that is what underpins the rationale of it. Then there is the Simon number. Those numbers are reconciled. The Simon outreach team meets with our research team and our outreach workers. We would say, for instance, that we had seen "Mary Hayes" and she is in this spot every day. When the Simon outreach worker saw the person they were bedded down and could not identify them and they were recorded as a “do not identify”. That might be recorded as an additional person but there is a reconciliation exercise to rule out if we know nothing about that and if there is a chance or likelihood that that person could be "Mary Hayes" who is counted elsewhere on the count. That is an example of someone who might be ruled out.