91Èȱ¬

When journalists are faced with a story that doesn't fit the accepted script, they tend to bin it - to pretend it hasn't happened.

That may be why received pretty much zero coverage.

We have been constantly told that it stands to reason: recession = more people homeless. So the alternative story was spiked.

It is, I admit, unexpected. I am at a housing conference in Harrogate today, and when I told delegates about the statistics, jaws dropped. They didn't know. It didn't compute.

• a 15% fall in people declaring themselves homeless to the local councils in England between January and March compared with the same period in 2008;
• a 26% fall in the number accepted as homeless;
• and the proportion of that dwindling number of cases which were down to people defaulting on their mortgage is also down - less than 3%, lower than at any time since 2007.

So where are the "middle-class homeless" we were warned about? Where are the thousands of rough sleepers the charities told us would be on the streets?

Leslie Morphy, Chief Executive of Crisis, stood at a soup kitchen last December and said "our fear is that as the recession bites in the new year, we are going to see more people in the same situation as those relying on our Christmas centres today".

Shelter offered a similarly gloomy prediction - soaring numbers in temporary accommodation.

Well, the number in temporary housing was actually 17% lower at the end of March than it was a year earlier - more than a third down on where it was in 2004.

The much-trumpeted policy that the government was relying on to stop the most vulnerable families losing their homes and going through the trauma of repossession was the £285m .

But the number of households in England which have accepted an offer through the scheme in its first four months is precisely two.

Yes, just two families have a roof over their head thanks to MRS, so ministers can hardly argue that that explains the fall in homelessness. (A similar scheme in Wales has been a little more successful, but would not affect the English homelessness stats.)

So there is a mystery.

Last year, repossessions hit a 12-year high at about 40,000. Now the Council of Mortgage Lenders is suggesting that this year may see 75,000. Perhaps the January-to-March data reflect the lull before the storm.

Even so, it seems odd that England has apparently escaped the kind of scenes being witnessed in America: tented villages of homeless people; motels requisitioned to house the destitute.

I recently attended a Cabinet Office briefing on the likely impact of the recession at which Tony Blair's former adviser Geoff Mulgan reminded the audience that homelessness actually went down in the last recession too. The private rented sector came to the rescue, he suggested. But he also offered a more sociological explanation: that British people are more tolerant and generous when times are hard. (See also the Young Foundation's , for which Mr Mulgan wrote the preface.)

Look at the main reason people gave for finding themselves without a roof over their head: 38% said it was because parents, relatives or friends were unable or unwilling to accommodate them.
It is far from ideal, but perhaps families are putting up with surplus children and grandchildren because they know how frightening it is to be homeless in a recession.

So I offer you a Map of the Week which tells the story of a dog which has not yet barked.

91Èȱ¬lessness acceptance rates are down in every region of England, with the biggest falls in the north west and the east Midlands, down 38% and 34% respectively.

The north east had the smallest decrease, down 9%.

The area with the highest proportion of its households which are homeless is London (0.9/1000), while the south east and south west of England have the lowest (0.3/1000).

Sometimes it is the stories which don't get written that tell the tale.

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