'It's a big crisis': Homelessness minister unable to confirm UK homelessness figures - as government unveils £87m fund tackling rough sleeping

Speaking with Nick Ferrari at Breakfast, the Minister for Local Government and Homelessness, Alison McGovern, was unveiling two new government funds to tackle homelessness across the UK.

She told Nick that the latest government figures showed that just 80,000 people in England were currently homeless.

Doubling down on her assertion when pushed on the numbers, the MP for Birkenhead insisted that 80,000 was the correct figure - with Nick stepping in to reveal the true scale of the problem.

"Just to clarify, you are the Minister for Homelessness and you don't know how many people are homeless?" Nick questioned.

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"I understand why you challenged me on knowing the numbers and I try to be across my brief, but I don't know the latest Shelter figure off the top of my head," the minister admitted.

'It's a big crisis,' the minister admitted.

Enlightening the minister, Nick continued: "Well, the crisis is considerably bigger than 80,000. Shelter, as of December of last year, said 382,000 people are homeless in England - not the United Kingdom. So I don't know where your figure of 80,000 comes from, Minister."

It comes as the government is set to introduce two new funds - allocating £50 million over three years to local authorities to innovatively tackle homelessness, and £37 million handed to "voluntary and community organisations".

Pushing back, the minister insisted that "Shelter have a broader look" when it comes to figures.

"You can measure homelessness, as you were saying before, in different ways because you can find people who are sofa surfing and other things who don't actually report themselves."

With Nick branding the government's bid to tackle the issue "very valiant", the government previously pledged to "halve long term rough sleeping over the course of the Parliament".

But with 382,000 people currently homeless across the UK - a number that continues to grow, the government is hoping to work directly

The minister told Nick she hopes that the funding will go towards additional staff who can work directly with rough sleepers to "help them get the kind of addiction support that they need".

"Somebody's been sleeping well for a long time because they can't break out of that cycle of addiction. You need a person to be with that member of our society to help them get to the right NHS support or addiction support, deal with what can often be a Byzantine housing system to work your way through.

Somebody who can help make sure that that person, when they do move into a home, they're able to keep up that tenancy because they're keeping up with their addiction support - and hopefully, even move into a job, which might seem like a dream for some people."

A second £37 million has been allocated to "voluntary and community organisations".

"The problem that we've got now is that we can see people sleeping rough long term, often for complicated reasons, addictions, debt, mental health challenges. So I want to help local authorities do things differently and really help get to the heart of those problems with people."