Despite the vast difference from the situation in British Isles, perhaps these data from the US may shed some light on the issues of political will, fiscal priorities, and scale of expense in caring for the homeless:

In the States, there are an estimated five hundred thousand homeless.

There are over two million prisoners.

The cost to government of their incarceration is approximately eighty billion dollars. A study by Washington University finds that for every dollar of governmental expense, there is an additional ten dollars in social costs.

Although there is no lack of political will to bear this financial burden, for some unspecified reason the problem of one-quarter that number of homeless people is supposed to be intractible, and it is left up to individual communities to patch solutions together as best they can.

In this context of such national indifference, pondering the details of a treatment plan seems marginally relevant.

In the British Isles things are no doubt very different, but is it really the case that the nations are bound and determined to solve this problem at all costs--if only they were not frustrated by, for example, the uncooperative attitudes of the homeless themselves?