About half an hour ago, Housing Minister Grant Shapps tweeted this:

We’re investing £400m in tackling homelessness over the next 4 years – zero cut to this budget in order to protect the most vulnerable.

This begged the question of how much homelessness was predicted to rise by as a result of the government’s policies. I’m thinking here of caps on housing benefit, sweeping changes (read cuts) to disability benefits, as well as of Mr. Shapps’ own proposal to evict people who took part in the recent riots (and their innocent families) from council housing. Because, you see, having a flat budget to tackle homelessness in the face of rising homelessness is effectively a cut.
Responding to my tweet asking this question of the Housing Minister, Sue Marsh quoted some stats, on decrease of homelessness under Labour and rise under the current government.
For the last half hour Mr. Shapps has been busy explaining how Labour doctored the stats. I am still waiting for an answer to my original question about his own doctoring of numbers and have tweeted it at him repeatedly. Do we think he’d spot irony if it bit him in the arse?