DURING the festive season we were reminded by television news broadcasters and newspapers in their customary hand-wringing way that this country’s bitterly cold streets have been “home” for rough sleepers. And that loneliness and poverty will plague the elderly. So, what’s new?

Sensationalist reporting aside, mainstream media have an attention deficit when it comes to the “unsexy” issue of rough sleeping and loneliness. More on that later.

Spiralling figures for homelessness and lack of affordable housing has made this social pandemic a hot political issue, with political parties from all sides falling over themselves to find measures that will resonate well with the public while cynically boosting their popularity and poll ratings.

The Conservatives, when they were in government in 2019, committed to ending rough sleeping by 2024, a target clearly not achieved. One of their leaders Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, was widely condemned after she controversially claimed rough sleeping was a “lifestyle choice.”

In the months leading up to Britain’s general election in July 2024, Labour said that when in government it would set up an “ending homelessness unit” in a newly created Office for the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. Ironically, Rayner was caught up in her own alleged council housing scandal earlier this year.

Recent data showed that in England’s capital alone there were 11,993 rough sleepers spotted on London’s streets between April 2023 and March 2024. That is a 19 per cent increase on the previous year’s total and 58 per cent higher than a decade ago.

These are statistics that shame the sixth wealthiest country in the world.

No doubt donations to homelessness charities will peak in December. Some people will assuage their guilt about being better off and organisations like the laudable Crisis and Shelter will do their utmost to ensure as many rough sleepers as possible are brought in from the cold to enjoy a semblance of what we take for granted each festive year.

But there is a chilling side to rough sleeping and loneliness in Britain that is a national scandal, which should be of major public interest however. It is being ignored by the gatekeepers of big media broadcasters and the press, obsessed with audience ratings won by featuring celebrities and making cheap reality TV shows.

In Britain, often dubbed the “loneliness capital of Europe,” the cost-of-living crisis has become the cost-of-dying crisis with a dramatic rise in people perishing alone on the streets or at home and given funerals by cash-strapped local councils.

Public health funerals, or paupers’ funerals as they are commonly known, are carried out by town halls for people who die alone or without relatives able to pay, as research done by my black-owned independent broadcast production company The-Latest Ltd has revealed.

Across the UK, paupers’ funerals are increasing at an alarming rate. Local authorities are struggling to meet the growing need among the poorest in our communities to ensure there is dignity in death and support for those who are left behind.

I know about the alarming statistics behind this emergency intimately because The-Latest Ltd sent Freedom of Information requests in 2024 to more than 30 councils in Britain, which revealed the breathtaking millions of pounds being spent by local authorities on paupers’ funerals.

We crunched the data, which showed that a total of £10 million was spent on paupers’ funerals in the last five years by the councils we contacted — one of them, Birmingham, spent in excess of £1 million.

We have worked as experienced documentary filmmakers, with previous commissions, including from BBC television and radio, for years trying to get a TV programme about the crisis of paupers’ funerals and those people abandoned by society commissioned by a broadcaster without success. This is after doing painstaking research, developing relationships with relevant agencies and potential interviewees. But we’ve been variously fobbed off.

All the powerful commissioners contacted have admitted that paupers’ funerals and the factors driving their dramatic increase are serious and worthy of attention but think it would be too “grim” for their audience. Yet, remarkably, their programme schedules are full of dramas and real-life stories depicting things like extreme violence and murder.

We want to raise public awareness and influence policy. The House of Commons work and pensions committee has called for the Competition and Markets Authority to intervene to control the way prices are set for funerals. The Church of England, which conducts a quarter of funerals in England, has called for an end to the “cruel experience” of paupers’ funerals.

Disappointingly, our dealings with the supposedly progressive British Film Institute (BFI) Doc Society who rejected funding for our film have been unsatisfactory and mirror the experience of our creative industry trade union colleague Faisal Qureshi, who produced the hit film Four Lions.

Qureshi accused the BFI of failing to deal with systemic racism to which they admitted. We have made our own internal complaint to BFI Brit Doc about the poor and discriminatory handling of our applications for documentary funding but that’s another story.

For me the tragedy behind paupers’ funerals is personal. In 2016, a Nigerian pensioner and lonely neighbour of mine was discovered by police in the bath of his council-owned, ground floor flat.

After he had gone missing for two months, housing officials were alerted by me that something was not right. Without family or close friends to fund or arrange his funeral, he was given a local authority funeral, which my production company exclusively filmed.

Among the news media coverage we managed to get was a story in Britain’s biggest selling Sun newspaper.

We interviewed two grieving friends who had lost touch with him. Southwark council in south London was so embarrassed by the press coverage we managed to get before the funeral, that they coughed up the money to give him a much more expensive burial rather than the usual cheaper option of a cremation.

More cases like this must be exposed to bring about much-needed change. But among the powerful and influential, who cares about the homeless and lonely?

Deborah Hobson is a filmmaker, radio producer and member of the National Union of Journalists’ national executive committee.