Campaigners have reacted with dismay after it was revealed the amount of people sleeping rough on the streets of Weymouth and Portland rocketed last year.

Government figures reveal that in 2017 there were 18 people sleeping rough in the borough, compared to 11 in 2016 – a 60 per cent increase.

In 2011 the number was just 2.

Overall, Weymouth and Portland has the highest percentage of rough sleepers per 1,000 households in the whole of Dorset.

In contrast, the number of rough sleepers in west Dorset stayed the same at just 2 in both 2016 and 2017. It was also 2 in 2011.

The data comes from the the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) based on a snapshot of a single night in autumn 2017.

Work is being carried out locally to try and tackle the issue of rough sleeping.

As reported by the Echo earlier this month, the Bus Shelter Dorset for homeless people launched at its new site in Weymouth. And national charity Julian House announced it will provide a new outreach service to rough sleepers in areas including Weymouth and Portland alongside the work that The Lantern Trust is already doing.

Angie Barnes spent 12 years volunteering with Soul Food, a charity which provides shelter, food and support for homeless people in Weymouth. She herself was homeless before she joined the charity.

Angie said: "In my last year with Soul Food I noticed the numbers of homeless people increasing. When I left in October last year, I was aware that we were getting more and more people coming in.

"There’s a lot more despair out there. When I had been helping people before there was despair, but people could cope. Last year I saw a lot more hopelessness – people can’t see a way out because the system is changing.

"I think we’re in for a big downwards spiral for the next couple of years before it gets any better. There’s a lot of fantastic ideas out there towards helping homeless people, but whether they are long term solutions, I don’t know."

Other coastal locations such as Brighton and Hove, Eastbourne and Southend-on-Sea also saw high numbers of rough sleepers compared to population levels.

Cllr Gill Taylor, borough council spokesman for housing, said: "Rough sleepers do tend to migrate towards the coast.

"The figures are huge for the population of Weymouth and Portland. It's not good and I don't like it, but we are in with trends across the country.

"There's an awful lot of support that rough sleepers get here, there's lots of voluntary organisations. There just isn't the amount of money to support them and there isn't the amount of houses to put them in that there has been before.

"There isn't an easy solution."

If you see someone sleeping rough on the streets you can report it at streetlink.org.uk

In the south west, the number of rough sleepers has soared by 115 per cent since 2010.

National homeless charity Crisis has called the figure ‘a catastrophe’ and is urging the government to take immediate action.

Chief Executive Jon Sparkes said: “It is truly a catastrophe that in a country as prosperous as this, more and more people are finding themselves forced to sleep in dangerous and freezing conditions, when we have evidence to show how the situation could be turned around.

“Rough sleeping ruins lives, leaving people vulnerable to violence and abuse, and taking a dreadful toll on mental and physical health.

“With the right support at the right time, homelessness doesn’t need to be inevitable. While we warmly welcome the Government’s pledges to tackle rough sleeping, including a Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Taskforce, now that we know the solutions to end rough sleeping for good we’re calling on the Government to take swift action to tackle the problem and fix it once and for all.”

Nationally, more people are sleeping rough on the streets of England than at any point this decade. Shadow Housing Secretary John Healey said the new figures were "an awful reminder of the consequences of a Conservative government".