A recent study found that 13,000 young people went to local authorities in October to declare themselves homeless; this number will be higher as there will be some who didn’t declare themselves.

In addition to this the number sleeping rough inLondonalone since April is already up 32% on the whole of last year.

This is in line with last month’s unemployment figures which showed that over a million 16-24 years old are unable to get a job. Without an address it is near-impossible to receive any Job Seekers Allowance or to be able to look for a job.

As benefits are also being cut and jobs are been lost, many teenagers are been asked to move out of their family home with nowhere else to go.

The true extent of this grim problem is that a lot of youth who are sleeping rough won’t seek help. Family breakdown, usually due to financial problems is the main cause of youth homelessness and that they’re too embarrassed or ashamed to go and seek help, or else think there isn’t any help available.

At the same time, youth have seen the EMA lifeline scrapped, tuition fees tripled and housing benefit and Child Support Allowance cuts. This puts huge pressure on families who are facing serious wage cuts, job losses, and home repossessions. The outcome is that young people with nowhere to go are turfed out onto the streets.

We have also seen massive decreases of youth services as councils are been made to make harsh cuts, leading to 75% cuts in youth service funding in many of Britiain’s most deprived boroughs. When services for the most vulnerable get cut, it makes it difficult for youth to receive services and help they need, especially if they can’t turn to their family. This simply makes a bad situation worse.

Young people living on the streets, particularly women, are incredibly vulnerable and rising cases of rape are the tragic consequence of the Tories austerity, which punishes young people for a crisis we didn’t cause.

Many of these attacks aren’t reported to the police as victims believe there is nothing they can do and that it could make their situation worse.

We need to end this situation now. We demand that youth are freed from the pressure of being a financial burden on their parents, by providing a living wage.

We need real investment in education, training and jobs – not token schemes forcing youth into unpaid shelf-stacking work.

Housing benefit must be available to all those over the age of 16 to enable young people to gain independence from the family and start making their own decisions about their career options.

We demand a reversal of the cuts to the connexions service, which has decimated on the few areas of support providing invaluable advice and guidance for young people.

We fight for an end to the discriminatory minimum wage which allows employers to pay young workers less than their co-workers for the doing the same job.

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