Prince William’s sidekick to end homelessness has been honoured by the King at Buckingham Palace.

Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, chief fire officer with West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, battled her way out of homelessness as a teenager to become a distinguished firefighter and an adviser to the Prince of Wales.

She was awarded the King’s Fire Service Medal during an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday.

The medal is awarded for distinguished service or gallantry, and recognises Dr Cohen-Hatton’s work at several key events including the Finsbury Park terror attack, the Westminster Bridge terror attack, and the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire.

The 42-year-old is now advising William as part of his Homewards campaign to end homelessness in the UK, and featured in his recent ITV documentary, We Can End Homelessness.

Speaking on Tuesday, Dr Cohen-Hatton said: ‘The fire service means a huge amount to me because I feel like, as firefighters, we’re trusted by people to know what to do when they’re having the worst day of their lives.

‘And, having gone through that and my service, being able now to advise Prince William as an advocate on Homewards, which is his programme aiming to demonstrate that it’s possible to end homelessness, it’s incredible.

‘Because when you go through those experiences, they’re awful. They’re absolutely dreadful.’

After the death of her father, her family sank into poverty and she became homeless at the age of 15.

When she was just 18, and after years of sleeping rough on the streets, she decided to join the fire service in South Wales.

She then went on to attain a degree in behavioural neuroscience from Cardiff University before becoming an honorary professor.

Dr Cohen-Hatton, who also became an ambassador with homelessness charity The Big Issue and credits it with saving her life, said she hopes she can use her experience to ‘change the narrative, so that people who are in my situation today don’t have to go through that’.

‘Homelessness is a really complex issue and the answer to it needs to be equally as multifaceted,’ she said.

Dr Cohen-Hatton also warned homelessness is becoming a bigger problem today.

‘We’re seeing more and more hidden homelessness as well – people staying on other people’s sofas, people sleeping in their cars, not necessarily even registering themselves as experiencing homelessness – so it can be really difficult to understand the numbers.

‘What we do know is that it’s a problem that’s growing.

‘I honestly believe that the light that the Prince of Wales has been able to shine on this has been an incredible driver, helping us to raise awareness.’

Dr Cohen-Hatton is also a psychologist and writer and an ambassador of Street Vet, which offers veterinary treatment to pets living with their owners on the street.

Her first book, a memoir called Heat Of The Moment, was published in 2019, the year she was a guest on Desert Island Discs.

Speaking ahead of the two-part documentary with ITV, neuroscientist Sabrina praised the royal’s commitment to ‘listening to people who have been there so we can try and do things that are really practical’.

She told This Morning: ‘He’s amazing and I’m one of several advocates, we’ve all got our own experience of homelessness or we’ve been touched by homelessness in some way.

‘One of the things he was really keen on was making sure that he’s listening to people who have been there so we can try and do things that are really practical.

‘Every time I’ve met the prince, he has been so focused on the human impact of homelessness and I think it’s really easy when you’re trying to do a programme as big as this and a challenge as big as ending homelessness to just focus on the strategy and forget about the people.

‘But he’s so focused on the trauma and the complexity and the impact on individuals and that for me has been a real privilege to be able to see that in action.’

The heir to the throne launched his most ambitious public project to date last year, inspired by the legacy of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who began taking him to shelters as a young child.

Homelessness has soared in recent years with 100,000 families in temporary accommodation – affecting 144,000 children – and almost 4,000 people sleeping rough every night.

But those looking to tackle it believe it can be combatted with a joined-up approach that stops people and families falling through the net in the first place.

Describing her trauma living on the street, Sabrina wrote in the Big Issue: ‘My father died when I was nine and I was in a single-parent household with a mum who found it incredibly difficult to cope and struggled terribly with her mental health.

‘We lived in abject poverty for several years as a result. When somebody goes to war with their demons, everyone around them gets hit by the shrapnel.

‘We were in a really volatile situation by the time I was 15, a crisis point where it was just too much. My mum loved me dearly but she didn’t have the capacity to be able to look after me properly. It was then that I started to sleep rough.’

Sabrina was in the middle of her GCSEs when she took the decision to live on the streets.

She would stash her books in a box in a derelict building after studying on the street – as she was fearful that asking for a school locker would ‘alert social services’ and plunge her family deeper into crisis.

However, her books were eventually torn apart by a ‘proper neo-Nazi skinhead’, who saw her surname Cohen on her gramma book and attacked Sabrina.

‘He put out a cigarette out on my arm. He really went to town on me. It was a horrible experience. After that I kept my books in a box in the Big Issue office. And I kept studying. I think I saw qualifications as a ticket out of there,’ recalled Sabrina.

The mother-of-one, who now has a PhD, has spoken widely about her own journey, telling the Lorraine programme in 2019: ‘I spent so many years hiding it and pretending it didn’t happen, it was the most difficult thing.

‘But there are thousands of people who are in the same position today as I was back then, and I wanted to be able to tell these people “your circumstances do not define you, they don’t determine where you end up, only you can”‘.

While homeless, Sabrina lived in a derelict building and said she had to fend off strangers’ attacks. She said she once woke up to someone urinating on her.

But she never gave up on herself. ‘I think everyone’s got a spark inside them,’ she said, ‘it just depends what you find to fuel the fire.’

‘I could see people all around me who would went straight downhill or wouldn’t survive. I wanted to be able to do something to help other people when they’re feeling vulnerable.

‘And that’s what attracted me to the fire service, because I knew what it felt to be having that worst day of your life,’ she explained.