Councils have given thousands of rough sleepers and homeless people one-way train, bus and flight tickets to leave areas and sometimes even to leave the country in the last four years, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Data obtained by the Guardian shows for the first time that 6,810 travel tickets have been purchased across 83 councils in England and Wales since 2015.

The Greater London area accounted for the majority of tickets purchased, with 4,159, more than a third of which were for journeys out of the UK, mostly to destinations in eastern Europe. More than 100 tickets have been purchased since 2015 by local authorities in Oxford, Nottingham, Blackpool, Manchester, Leicester and Exeter.

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