HOMELESSNESS in Britain has hit a record high, with at least 320,000 people lacking a permanent roof over their heads, according to a new survey by housing charity Shelter.

With the total having increased by 13,000 in the last year alone, one in 200 people across the country are now homeless, the report says.

About 295,000 of them are in forms of temporary accommodation after being registered as homeless by local authorities.

In London, 170,000 people — roughly one in 52 — have no home, the survey found.

The east London borough of Newham is ranked as Britain’s homelessness capital, with over 14,500 people living in temporary accommodation and at least 76 on the streets. This equates to one in 24 Newham residents.

In the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Britain’s richest borough, over 5,000 people — one in every 29 residents — are homeless, while 127 people sleep rough in affluent Camden.

Elsewhere in the country, Birmingham, Coventry, Harlow, Milton Keynes and Slough were all found to have high rates of homelessness

The number of affected people shot up by 12 per cent in Yorkshire and the West Midlands in the past year, while it grew by 11 per cent in the north-west.

This is Shelter’s third homeless survey and the third since the Homelessness Reduction Act was passed in May, supposedly to force local authorities to intervene in favour of people at risk of being made homeless.

Shelter warned that its figures underestimate the extent of the problem, since they do not factor in the “hidden homeless” who sleep on friends and relatives’ sofas and on public transport.

Shelter chief executive Polly Neate said: “Due to the perfect storm of spiralling rents, welfare cuts and a total lack of social housing, record numbers of people are sleeping out on the streets or stuck in the cramped confines of a hostel room.”

Labour shadow housing minister Melanie Onn said: “It is appalling that enough people to fill a city the size of Newcastle will wake up this Christmas without a home.

“This is the outcome of eight years of austerity that even the United Nations say was designed to hurt the poor.”