“It is beautiful,” said Craig ab Iago, Gwynedd council’s cabinet member for housing. “But there is an emergency here, a massive wave of a problem. It’s out of control.”

That emergency is the number of homeless people, which has increased in Gwynedd by 47% in the past two years. “It’s hidden. You don’t see people sleeping rough,” said Ab Iago. “But people are sleeping on sofas, in hotels, in bed and breakfasts, in vans. It’s immoral that some people have a second home here while others don’t have one.”

Gwynedd council’s Plaid Cymru-controlled cabinet this week voted for council tax premiums to be raised to 150% next year and the £3m raised be used to tackle homelessness. The full council, which is controlled by Plaid Cymru, will make a final decision next week.

Council tax premiums on second homes in Gwynedd are currently set at 100% and the discussion has tended to focus on whether this is having any impact on the housing sales market. The rationale for introducing the premium is to free up homes for local people, to stop the hollowing out of communities, which affects the viability of the Welsh language.

But the council is now arguing that another vital issue is the impact the number of second homes is having on the rental sector. People who cannot afford to buy are renting, so the number of properties available is shrinking and homeless figures are soaring.

The housing crisis in England has seen many people forced into increasingly unaffordable housing beyond their means. While this problem is often framed as one affecting urban areas, the lack of genuinely affordable housing also affects rural areas.

This crisis bears a heavy cost as it pushes young people and low-income earners out of the places they call home. Not only does this raise the question about whether rural communities can survive and thrive without a future generation, it also bears a significant human cost, with increasing numbers of people being pushed into rural homelessness.

Housing affordability in rural areas has significantly worsened in the past decade. Since 2011, the amount of social housing built in rural areas has decreased by 83 per cent. Instead, consecutive governments have encouraged the construction of so-called ‘affordable housing’ in its place. This type of housing can be set at up to 80 per cent of market rents, meaning that in many areas, it is only marginally more affordable than private rented housing.

The root of the problem lies with government policy. Since 2012, successive governments have made the idea of affordable rent far more attractive to housing developers than social housing.

Government funding has channelled significant amounts of money into the construction of affordable rent homes, largely at the expense of building social rent homes.

Faced with a shortage of social rent housing that is genuinely affordable and stuck with the option of ‘affordable rent’ or private rent, many low-income households increasingly face a stark choice between trying to afford high rents in their local area or looking for cheaper housing elsewhere.

We can look closer to home than Germany, the US and Finland to combat rough sleeping (Hundreds of people are dying on our streets. Let’s give them homes, Editorial, 3 October). As a result of Blair’s cross-departmental initiative introduced in 1997, rough sleeping stood at 532 on any given night in England in 2001. By 2018 it had risen to an estimated 5,000 people, and, as your editorial points out, 726 people, or on average two a day, die on the streets.

Yes, a Housing First approach is urgently needed, not least because of the neglect of social housing by successive governments over the last 20 years. A desperate situation has been compounded by draconian cuts since 2010, the impact of universal credit on the most vulnerable, and the cutting to the bone of preventive services to address mental health, drug and relationship problems when they first arise. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are creating a welfare system underpinned by punishment, regulation and deterrence, that legitimises the sacrificing of the street homeless.

Claims that rough sleeping is falling in England should not be trusted until the government has explained how an emergency funding scheme for the worst-affected areas might have skewed the latest figures, the chair of the UK statistics Authority (UKSA) has said.

Sir David Norgrove’s comments are the latest development in a row over the apparent 2% fall in rough sleeping in England in 2018, which ministers said was a sign the government’s Rough Sleeping Initiative (RSI) was tackling the homelessness crisis.

In a significant intervention, Norgrove said the official figures for 2018 should not be used to make claims about rough sleeping in England until the government addresses concerns that some councils that received RSI funding had deliberately underreported the scale of the crisis in their area.

John Gray, 50, has always lived in the countryside. As a manual labourer he never learned to use a computer, which made it hard when he first applied for benefits. Gray became homeless after suffering a mental breakdown; when he was released from the hospital, he had nowhere to go.

Some of the barriers to Gray accessing help relate to this rural setting. Public transport is expensive: when Gray first signed up to receive universal credit once he got settled in at the Dairy House, he says he spent £67 on buses to his allocated Job Centre in Bath, because they couldn’t process his claim at one closer by. Advisers in the Citizens Advice Bureau in Shepton Mallet report sending people to court in taxis for fear they will end up unfairly prosecuted, with no train early enough to take them.

The Department for Communities and Local Government does not recognise rural homelessness as a separate problem. A DCLG spokesman says: “Tackling homelessness is a complex issue with no single solution, but we’re determined to help the most vulnerable in society, whether they live in towns, cities or rural areas.”

However, in rural areas, homelessness feels very different. Paddy Johnston was discovered by Dairy House staff on one of their early-morning scouting tours. He describes how he gradually found himself living rough in ever-more isolated places, fearing groups of men coming out of pubs drunk and rowdy.

“You fear retribution for sleeping rough – people aren’t very nice,” he says. “If you go into the countryside, you’re sort of away from all that.”

But there are elements that make countryside rough sleeping dangerous, too. Johnston mentions run-ins with unhappy farm owners after, unbeknown to him, he had pitched up on their private farmland. Whether in the countryside or a city, he says: “Generally, you’re in hiding.”

Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled, with 4,137 individuals recorded as rough sleepers in autumn 2016. New figures due to be released later this month by the Department for Communities and Local Government are not expected to show any improvement; if anything the figures are likely to show a worsening situation.

Homelessness is not confined to the streets of towns and cities. Our recent research reported a 42% increase in rough sleeping between 2010 and 2016 in predominantly rural areas and has highlighted the particular challenges associated with being homeless in rural areas.

In rural areas, shelter is limited and emergency hostels are rare, with individuals reporting sleeping in tents, barns, cars and outhouses. It can be harder to access support services provided by councils and charities; communities are more isolated and public transport is often infrequent and expensive. Outreach work is also more of a struggle for professionals working in remote locations, where resources are stretched and where there are often concerns about the safety of lone workers.

These challenges increase during bad weather. Severe travel disruption can cut off entire rural communities, preventing people from reaching more sheltered locations, and essential shops and services. Plummeting temperatures are more keenly felt in the absence of the residual heat of urban centres.

If central government is truly committed to reducing homelessness, as legislation passed in the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 suggests, it must devise and implement a new national homelessness strategy that includes a thorough assessment of the scale and nature of rural homelessness.

One in five young people in the UK have sofa-surfed in the past year and almost half of them have done so for more than a month.

This article asks ‘in a city – and a country – that is among the wealthiest in the world, how can this be possible?’

It follows the publication of a new on hidden homelessness .The report estimates that there are 13 times more hidden homeless people in London than those who are sleeping rough. Our own figures, based on surveys by YouGov and ComRes, suggest that almost a quarter of a million under-25s in London have stayed in an unsafe place because they have nowhere to call home.

The first problem is that this country is not very good at counting all the people who need support with housing, something that has been a concern to both the UK Statistics Authority and the Communities and Local Government select committee in recent years.

As the committee’s report highlights today, rough sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg. While the government has attempted to funnel financial resources to support those already on the streets, the funding for other individuals who have nowhere to live has too often been lacking. That leaves local authorities without the money to offer support to this much bigger group.

The current law, rightly, ensures that very vulnerable people – such as care leavers, under-18s, those with children, and men and women fleeing domestic violence – are prioritised for support.

The law does not preclude support being given to people outside these categories, but in practice there is simply not enough money left in the system for local authorities to go much beyond their legal duties. As assembly members point out, that means that some vulnerable groups are not guaranteed support, including thousands of young people that are housed and supported by Centrepoint.

Many people who are classified as hidden homeless could qualify for support, particular under the new Homelessness Reduction Act, which was passed into law earlier this year. But too often young people do not know where to go for help. Whether through adverts on public transport or helplines, much more could be done to publicise existing support

Almost 80,000 families a year in England face the prospect of becoming homeless by 2020 unless Theresa May abandons controversial cuts to housing benefit and support, it has been claimed.

The projection, which includes 60,000 households with children, is in addition to those sleeping rough on the streets. The new statistics will likely alarm campaigners who have already warned the country’s most vulnerable people would not be able to afford the rent on their homes if the Government goes ahead with the budget cuts.

John Healey, who resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench as the shadow housing minister following the European Union referendum, has published his projections, provided to The Independent, in an attempt to persuade Ms May’s new administration to abandon cuts to housing support and housing benefit pencilled in by the former Chancellor George Osborne.