THE number of people who are sleeping rough on the streets of Oxford is far higher than the outreach team agency has counted, a campaigner for the homeless has claimed.

Busker Neo, who says he lives outdoors by choice, told the Oxford Mail he had counted 102 people sleeping rough on the streets in and around the city centre.

The 44-year-old said he had gone three miles in every direction out of the city centre to find people ‘sleeping in fields, trees and tents’.

He added: “I laughed to their face when I was told there was only 39 people recorded as sleeping rough. I just said ‘I’ll get back to you’. 102 people was my last count. The council only look at the city centre, but I went out in all directions and people were hiding away in fields.”

Neo said more needed to be done to prevent those receiving help from homeless services from falling back into a life on the streets.

His comments came after it was announced that Simon House and Julian Housing beds would be scrapped as part of a £1.5m funding cut by the county council over the next three years after the Government reduced support.

Neo said the funding cuts had created a homeless ‘epidemic’.

Homeless services over the next three years will receive £2.94m after the county council, all five district councils, and the Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group stumped up the cash until 2019 – meaning 154 out of 286 beds across Oxfordshire will be still be scrapped.

More vulnerable people on the streets will have a detrimental impact on Oxford’s society and increase crime, a homeless support volunteer said.

Oxford City Council fund the outreach services which conduct the count of rough sleepers each year.

Readers took to social media to voice their concern.

One reader wrote: “This is awful, how can they justify cutbacks on this kind of thing? If anything they should be spending more to stop this from happening. This angers me.”

Another said: “I was homeless in Oxford in 1991 and again in 2000. I’ve never seen it so bad, they are human beings.”

Claire Dowan, of OxHop, said she ‘did not expect’ such drastic cuts.