Homeless people living on the streets of London have been accused of littering and urinating in the street. Some rough sleepers have reportedly set up small tents near busy tourist locations in the centre of the city, and some images claim to show several men putting squashing flower beds and one urinating in the street. One man told MailOnline that asylum seekers have been sleeping on the steps outside Westminster Cathedral.
He said: “There were dozens of them sleeping there when I was walking around at 7am this morning. They were sleeping on cardboard and dirty mattresses – some had little tents. At 8am, some grumpy looking security arrived to move them away. The migrants dumped their bedding in the flower beds and left. They have been coming back every night – nobody seems able to stop them.
“Some of them were urinating in public against walls. It’s not nice for local people or the cathedral. This is Easter weekend, there are constant services going on, it’s not right.”
There are currently around 187,000 homeless people in London, including people sleeping rough and those living in temporary accommodation provided by the council.
There were 11,993 rough sleepers spotted on London’s streets between April 2023 and March 2024, according to Combined Homeless and Information Network research.
This marked a 19% increase on the previous year’s total and a 58% increase on the figure a decade ago.
This comes after the Express exclusively revealed that around 50 people – mainly from Eritrea – were sleeping rough on the steps of Westminster Cathedral. Witnesses said the number grew over the last three months – from “five to ten” to dozens.
Security officers wake them up and move them on each morning before services, but the migrants move their belongings to a nearby tree and move them back later in the day.
Robert Bates, of the Centre for Migration Control, said: “The rot caused by the failure of our immigration system strikes at the very heart of this country.
“These photos show that, far from assimilation, open borders have admitted large numbers of people who neither know, nor care, about the heritage of this country.
“On this holiest of weekends, the fact they are literally on the doorsteps of a Christian place of worship is all too apt a metaphor for the soft touch that this country has become.”
