WASTE disposal company Biffa's decision to fit cameras to many of its vehicles was taken, doubtless, from a position of compassion.

The fact that four fellow human beings, who had been reduced to seeking a night's shelter in large wheelie bins, were crushed to death in the bowels of waste hoppers is a sickening thought.

If hopper crews are able to identify potential victims in future and save them from a grisly fate, that's certainly positive.

But what do such occurrences say about society's priorities in what is still one of the top five or six economies in the world?

The vast majority of people who climb into wheelie bins as a place to sleep - a shelter from wind, rain and cold - do so because they have hit rock bottom.

Without a job, a home, a relationship and hope for the future, they are reduced to a desperate scramble to seek cover from the elements.

The fact that Biffa found 93 people sleeping in its wheelie bins last year indicates that rough sleeping is a growing problem.

While it is difficult to acquire exact figures because of different ways of calculating the problem in Britain's constituent nations and regions, London's streets alone account for between 6,000 and 7,000 rough sleepers. 

People sleeping rough are not an alien or discrete species.

They are simply one expression of the problem of homelessness that affects this relatively rich country, caused by a shortage of properties to rent at a reasonable cost.

The assault on local authority housing offering good, secure homes at affordable rents began with Margaret Thatcher's messianic drive to sell of council accommodation to tenants at a discount.

While this was welcomed by those who bought their own homes at below market prices, it also offered a market opportunity to property speculators bent on taking over former council homes and offering them for rent on a commercial basis.

This situation has been exacerbated by the twin failure of Tory and Labour governments to halt privatisation or fund a substantial council house building programme.

Paradoxically, given the 2011 Localism Act, councils stripped of their housing stock by neoliberal governments of whatever hue have met their duty of care by offering homeless local people tenancies in privately owned former council properties at higher rents and without the security of tenure enjoyed by council tenants.

Conservative coalition government policy has pushed people onto the streets through benefit cuts - notably through the bedroom tax, reduced council tax benefits, capped local housing allowance rates and restrictions on the Social Fund.

Public spending cuts have also affected homeless hostels that now offer fewer than 40,000 beds to single people in England.

Homelessness is without doubt a government generated problem and its solution requires a state-led response.

Political parties' obsession with the supposed need to hold down public spending - so as not to raise taxation on big business and the rich - militates against providing the essential human requirement of a rood over everyone's head.

When Britain was on the bones of its backside after the Second World War, the Labour government built hundreds of thousands of council houses, as well as the NHS. 

That was because ministers saw the public requirement for decent homes as more important than wringing their hands over national debt.

Investment to meet crucial human need is just as important now.

 The alternative is to accept as inevitable more degrading and horrific deaths suffered by homeless people.