Whether you consider his political strategy to be savvy social networking or a selling out to Instagram, Andy Burnham’s grasp of what makes politics relatable is his key strength as prime minister. He demonstrated this with an unexpected but important announcement on his very first day in office: to end rough sleeping across England by Christmas.
Although designed to highlight his social conscience, this was also a straightforward retail policy. Alongside the rising cost of food and fuel, the sight of people sleeping rough in our towns and cities is one of the most tangible sights of the degradation of the British economy and the fraying of the social safety net. People are upset by it. They notice it and they wonder what is going wrong. That’s why sorting it out is one of the first promises the new prime minister has made.
Burnham’s plan is to roll out a version of the project that led to huge success in reducing rough sleeping in Greater Manchester between 2019 and 2021 across the whole country. But can the principles of one small scale scheme – which only suppressed rough sleeping numbers for a short period of time – solve a wider, national issue? Experts are divided.
There are lessons to learn from Manchester’s progress, but other projects at home and overseas could provide far better guidance for Burnham as he works with councils to meet the tight Christmas deadline.
What worked?
Burnham’s Greater Manchester scheme was one of the first projects in the country to implement the principles of an idea called Housing First. Inspired by work in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia, this approach offers anyone facing homelessness access to stable accommodation first, before tackling any other social issues that a rough sleeper might also be facing – such as mental illness, substance addiction, or unemployment. In the past, agencies would often refuse support for anyone who failed to address their alcoholism or drug use, but these schemes focused on the most urgent need: shelter and safety.
Like elsewhere in Europe, Housing First has a very high success rate in Manchester. The original £1.5m scheme set up by Burnham as Greater Manchester mayor included support and investment from local councils, charities and business and focused on making sure vulnerable people had access to support from the first night they came to sleep outside. Burnham’s “bed every night” scheme created 600 new beds in emergency accommodation.
It was introduced in 2019 and two years later it had housed more than 450 people, with 269 still working with the Greater Manchester programme. The rough sleeping count, though, tells a much more complex story. Initially it plunged from 268 people per month to just 90, which also coincided with national efforts to get “everyone in” during the covid pandemic, but after 2021 it began to rise again. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority put that down to attraction of the project bringing vulnerable people to the area because they knew they would get support but there were other flaws too – and these will need to be addressed if the national target is to be met.
Nevertheless an independent evaluation showed that in its first three years it reduced rough sleeping 20 per cent points faster than the rest of the country thanks to the combined efforts of all agencies.
Housing First depends heavily on a shared set of values, particularly from all local councils in a region but also voluntary and charity sector groups too. In Greater Manchester that was straightforward to foster as almost all local authorities were under Labour control. Even though it is officially government policy to operate a Housing First approach in all homelessness cases, including rough sleeping, across the country there is huge divergence of opinion on the social value of investing heavily in vulnerable people.
According to Megan Hector, senior policy manager at Homeless Link, before Burnham’s plan was introduced the vague commitment to Housing First came with a “general lack of ambition” which has been used as an excuse to avoid following these guidelines by councils either struggling so hard for cash they can’t face up to their homelessness problem, or who are ideologically opposed to the Housing First philosophy – or both.
The government has now created a single pot of cash to fund rough sleeping prevention work but without clear instructions or incentives guiding how to use it, these principles could go on being ignored. Burnham’s push for widespread devolution is a risk to the success of this project. Differences of opinion could unpick the core elements of what has been found to work effectively, and so homelessness charities are together calling for the government to issue strict guidelines around how this money should be spent locally to support rough sleepers. “We’re still trying to find out how far Andy is going to go. It will remain to be seen to what ends he will have to, with the carrot and the stick,” Hector says.
Quality control
London’s City Hall also made major improvements in reducing rough sleeping in London following a similar approach to Greater Manchester. In the last year, that work has been surprisingly effective. There were 3,959 people recorded as sleeping rough in the capital in April to June 2026, a decrease of 10% on the April to June period in 2025. There were 1,685 people recorded sleeping rough for the first time in the first quarter this year, 16% lower than the same time last year.
Experts say the lesson to learn from London’s success is to ensure there is sufficient high quality accommodation available to provide emergency support for rough sleepers to move quickly off the street and into supported housing. In London, the volume of housing stock has made this easier to achieve than some areas, but the real benefit has come from the freedom and funding that devolution has offered.
“London does have a lot of really effective provision. I think areas where devolved funding and have been able to develop much better partnership working with the voluntary and community sector,” Hector says. In Leeds, a similar focus on bringing charities together to provide enough accommodation options has led to the city sustaining a rough sleeping rate half that of Nottingham and Liverpool per 100,000 people.
But success in raising bed numbers has come with a cost.According to Ben Reeve-Lewis, founder of Safer Renting and a legal advisor to councils on private rent, there has been a rush of supported housing providers set up to offer accommodation drawn in by the enhanced rate of housing benefit offered for providers of housing with additional support for vulnerable tenants. In reality, they are making no efforts to scaffold their residents’ lives and often create a new revolving door of homelessness once the extra funding provided by the local authority runs out.
Reeve-Lewis says he saw one provider in Enfield supporting 20 homeless women across two properties, claiming the enhanced rate and yet offering nothing more than a 10 minute phone call each month asking if they were OK. As soon as this failure of service was exposed and challenged by the local authority, the provider “showed their true colours” and all the women were evicted.
This pattern is being repeated all over the country. For councils who are short on funding, distinguishing a rogue landlord from a legitimate community service provider takes time and money. “So much money is being given away and the problem of rough sleeping is being exacerbated,” says Reeve Lewis. “Local authorities are so desperate that they just don’t ask any questions and put people in the most awful places without even a visit. There’s a whole market for it: a racket.
“In Birmingham they’ve spent so much money every year on supported accommodation where providers aren’t providing any support. It’s a big problem, and they are tackling it - but not everywhere is.”
Repeated exposure to bad support only entrenches the cycle of homelessness for rough sleepers. In Liverpool and Bradford, councils have introduced regular, detailed checks on any landlord or community provider offering housing to the local authority. Reeve Lewis says that to be successful Burnham must instruct all councils to not only focus on the provision of emergency housing but on whether it’s actually doing the job it promises to do, as is already happening in these outlier cities.
Counting correctly
One of the trickiest problems in understanding rough sleeping is getting the numbers right. Every council carries out regular counts, but these often miss women. Almost all services claim that female rough sleeping is rare, but that is not the case. It’s just invisible and under-served.
According to Jasmine Basran, head of policy and campaigns at homelessness charity Crisis, research consistently demonstrates that there are 10 times the number of women sleeping rough than accounted for in the annual, national snapshot figures shared nationally. “There’s a well identified issue of knowing that women are under-counted on the streets because they hide for safety. Women’s provision is really lacking.”
This is another area that Leeds has tackled effectively. A pilot scheme pairing homeless women with a supported housing placement found that wraparound support led to almost all participants still sustaining their tenancies a year after being given a secure home. The scheme was also found to reduce other issues for the women including exposure to domestic violence and coercion - frequent drivers of homelessness. Councils must spend some of the money allocated specifically to marginalised groups, including LGBT people, that may be hidden in the data to be successful by Christmas.
Ultimately, though, cutting rough sleeping is only the most visible element of a much wider housing crisis across Britain, and most evident in the cities where that crisis is felt most acutely. Burnham may wish to create a homelessness support system that apes Finland, but today that simply isn’t possible. “We’re campaigning to change the system,” says Hector, “but there are challenges. We need a massive increase in housing supply in order to do that.” The success of Housing First requires the security of a strong, inclusive benefits system and enough decent homes to house those in need. In the current global economy, even Finland is now struggling with that. It’s own rough sleeping population is rising again. ■
About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing.
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We managed to fix rough sleeping very quickly during the Covid-19 pandemic. I seem to recall that the better outcomes for the homeless people (fewer illnesses requiring admission etc) more than paid for the cost of the housing.