MORE than a dozen homeless people have died on the streets of Bolton in less than a decade, according to new figures.

The findings, from the Office for National Statistics, show that a total of 19 homeless people have died in the borough since 2013, one of which was just last year.

This was Peter ‘Trigger’ Charnock, 47, who was often seen around the Great Lever and Daubhill areas of Bolton before being discovered collapsed and pronounced dead in a car parked in Haslam Street, Great Lever on July 1.

Responding to the inquest into Mr Charnock's death resident Junaid Patel said: “He was part of the Daubhill furniture.

“I never knew him personally but I’ve seen him around for more than 20 years. If you’d wave he’d wave back.

“Most school kids know who he was. His nickname was ‘Trigger’."

A total of nearly 700 died across England and Wales as a whole over the same period, with housing charity Shelter calling on the government to do more to tackle, the "ravages of homelessness."

Shelter chief executive Polly Neate said: "To think people's final days were spent homeless in the pandemic is a sobering thought.

"If it wasn’t for the government’s Covid response to help people off the streets even more lives would have been lost.

“As we head into another hard winter with the virus still circulating, we cannot leave anyone out in the cold."

Nearly nine in 10 people who died while homeless nationally were men, while two in five lost their lives to drug poisoning and more than a dozen died with Covid-19.

Though the figure includes some deaths that happened during the previous year but were not registered until 2020 due to pandemic-inspired disruption to services, Shelter says that the true scale of homeless deaths could be higher than reported.

A across the country separate figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government show 1,484 households were identified as being homeless, or at risk of homelessness, during the first year of the pandemic.

In response, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities says that the government is providing more than £2 billion over the next three years to tackle homelessness.

A spokesperson said: “Every death on our streets is one too many, which is why we remain committed to ending rough sleeping altogether.“