Almost 2,500 homeless people have been arrested by police in England and Wales since 2019 under the Georgian-era Vagrancy Act, among them nearly 500 people since the government pledged to replace the act in 2022.
Freedom of information requests to police forces by the Liberal Democrats showed a total of 2,412 arrests since 2019 under the 1824 law, originally introduced to target homeless and wounded veterans of the Napoleonic wars.
