A homeless woman had her belongings set on fire by a man muttering ‘scum of the earth’, it has been claimed.
Chloe Lees said she spotted the man using his lighter to torch a sleeping bag in a doorway next to Poundland on Cheltenham High Street.
She said the alleged incident, on January 17, ‘shook her to the core’ and left her horrified.
A woman spotted a man trying to set light to a homeless person’s sleeping bag in a doorway next to Poundland in Cheltenham, where graffiti like this can be seen
Miss Lees said: ‘I didn’t know at the time whether someone was inside the sleeping bag or not. I thought he might be trying to kill the person.
‘People were just walking past trying to avoid the man but I started shouting at him “stop that at once!”
She added: ‘When he saw me shouting at him he started to snuff out the flames and I heard him muttering to himself “scum of the earth”.
‘There was a lot of damage done to her belongings but if she had been asleep he could have killed her.’
Miss Lees claimed she had walked past the Poundland earlier in the day and spotted the young woman begging there.
She said she didn’t contact the police because she didn’t think they would care.
Miss Lees said she was ‘shocked and appalling’ by the man’s actions.
She described him as being 6ft tall and of stocky build. She said he was smartly dressed in dark jeans and a dark anorak.
She said: ‘He didn’t seem to care that people could see him. He appeared very drunk but that is no excuse.
‘You couldn’t tell whether anyone was inside the sleeping bag or not because her possessions were underneath it. It looked like someone was underneath the blankets sleeping.’
The doorway near Poundland is a popular place of shelter for homeless people but it has been vandalised with graffiti urging people not to give money to the homeless
Miss Lees said she’d been homeless herself for two weeks in London.
‘I know how vulnerable you feel’, she explained. ‘It’s indescribable. People treat you abysmally.
‘But I’ve never seen anyone do something as extreme and cruel as setting a young girl’s sleeping bag and backpack on fire. It shook me to my core.’
The doorway near Poundland is a popular place of shelter for homeless people but it has been vandalised with graffiti urging people not to give money to the homeless.
The council have been informed of the graffiti but said it is private property and the responsibility of the building’s owner.
The incident comes as new figures today revealed more people are sleeping rough on the streets of England than at any point this decade, with numbers rocketing 73 per cent since 2014.
Local authorities estimated there were around 4,751 rough sleepers on a single night in autumn 2017, according to data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
It marks another steep rise from the year before, up 15 per cent from 2016 to the highest point since comparable records began in 2010.
In autumn 2014 the figure was nearly three-quarters lower, at 2,744.
Homelessness charities condemned the trend as a ‘catastrophe’ while calling on the Government to step up its work to end destitution.