The obstacles to Burnham’s key day-one pledge

In his first speech as Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham made a huge promise: he wants to end rough sleeping across the nation. This will be backed by a five-year plan with an additional £340 million of funding from the Ministry of Housing, bringing overall funding to get people off the streets to record levels. The announcement comes after government statistics showed that rough sleeping has hit a new record high in England alone, but Burnham hopes to build on his experiences of trying to solve the issue in Greater Manchester and coming up against barriers. Shorts “For too long, we’ve been told that ending rough sleeping will take decades or even that it’s impossible. I’m not having that,” Burnham said outside Number 10 Downing Street. Across the country, tent encampments (which were eradicated during the Gordon Brown years) have reemerged in city centres. It is once again common to see rough sleepers lined up in shop doorways with sleeping bags and cardboard mattresses. One source told The i Paper that Burnham understands that this is having both a “negative” effect on how people view Britain and, also, a “moral and ethical problem”. It is understood that James Purnell, Burnham’s Chief of Staff, is also personally across the policy. It is difficult to verify the exact number of people living on the streets. However, the number of people estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2025 was 4,793. This is the fourth annual increase in a row, and 171 per cent higher than 2010 when the snapshot approach to data collection on the streets was introduced. A homelessness sector insider warned that while they welcomed Burnham’s choice of flagship policy, it was a “gamble” because of how “complex” the issue is. It’s not the first time a UK prime minister has made the pledge. Burnham follows Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, who each missed their own targets to end homelessness. Housing First The policy framework that Burnham wants to use to end rough sleeping, as he outlined in his Manchester speech a few weeks ago, is called Housing First. Housing First is a bold intervention which provides rough sleepers with a permanent, independent home without any preconditions, regardless of whether they are suffering with other, often related, issues such as unemployment, mental health or addiction. The policy is also currently being championed by Prince William. The plan will lean heavily on Burnham’s ambition for an emboldened devolution agenda. Local leaders – such as mayors and councils – will control delivery of the programme. The new funding, which Burnham says only represents “the opening investment”, will provide 1,200 homes and intensive support for at least 3,000 people. Who are the thousands of rough sleepers on Britain’s streets? According to the Ministry of Housing’s own data, in September 2025, 78 per cent of the people sleeping rough over the course of the month were from the UK. 923 people (11 per cent) were European Economic Area (EEA) nationals and 950 people (11 per cent) were non-EEA nationals. The nationality of 813 people was unknown. Experts have put the rise in the number of people sleeping rough down to a combination of factors, including inflation, the end of the ‘Everyone In’ scheme, which housed people on the streets without question during the pandemic and migration. Lord John Bird, crossbench peer and founder of the Big Issue, said he welcomed Burnham’s pledge. “I’m also encouraged to hear his intention to build a more preventative state,” Lord Bird said. Day one of Burnham’s premiership marks day 222 of the Starmer Government’s promise to end homelessness, which was severely scaled back in Autumn 2025 to become a pledge to halve the number of families living in temporary accommodation. The European countries that have been successful – and what the UK can learn Housing First has been adopted by other major comparable economies including Finland (whose scheme is considered the blueprint), Denmark, Norway, Japan and Canada. There are now almost no rough sleepers in Finland and each of these countries has a significantly lower rough sleeping rate compared to the UK. Matt Downie, Chief Executive of the homelessness charity, Crisis, told The i Paper that Burnham’s decision “to adopt a ‘housing first philosophy’ has the potential to rewrite the norms of dealing with homelessness.” “Successfully implemented by countries including Finland, Denmark and Japan, this approach prioritises mainstream housing over a series of expensive temporary fixes,” Downie said. “Backed by the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period, this could truly be a turning point in tackling homelessness.” England’s Housing Benefit bill now costs £36 billion a year. It is projected to keep rising. Added to that, local councils in England spent £2.84 billion on temporary accommodation for homeless households in 2024/25. This cost is escalating rapidly, with a 25 per cent increase year-over-year. Lessons from Manchester As Manchester city centre’s skyline transformed into a sea of skyscrapers under Burnham’s leadership, a direct contrast was emerging at street level. The number of tents on pavements became more noticeable, as did people visibly begging. It was for this reason that Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping and homelessness when he first became mayor in 2017. It was a visible manifestation of the argument that Manchester’s rapid economic growth had not benefitted everyone, and that perhaps it may even be making things worse for those at the sharp end. In practice, Burnham and his team found it an incredibly difficult issue to tackle. He set up the A Bed Every Night (ABEN) scheme, a programme of funded accommodation which meant that anyone who didn’t have somewhere to sleep could have one, while Greater Manchester’s councils increased their rough sleeping teams to go out and support those in need. Hundreds of people have been helped by ABEN while Burnham donated 15 per cent of his mayoral salary to a homelessness charity. Rough sleeping is hard to measure, for obvious reasons. But official counts did show ABEN making a difference during Burnham’s time in office. However, the tents never disappeared completely and after the pandemic – when thousands of rough sleepers were temporarily housed to help contain the virus – they began to increase. Ironically, some experts believe Manchester made itself something of a magnet for rough sleeping because of the extra help on offer. Some of those sleeping rough had come from places outside the city-region, or from other countries. Burnham also learned that there is a huge difference between people who have previously been in secure housing and just need a helping hand getting back on their feet, and those with complex issues such as mental health problems and drug and alcohol addiction. Homelessness experts say there is a cohort of people who may require years of intervention in multiple aspects of their lives before they are ready to have a regular home. In Manchester, Burnham also raged at other aspects of rough sleeping he couldn’t control. Newly granted refugees faced eviction with little notice from Home Office accommodation, resulting in large groups of migrants living together in tents, often in visible locations such as near Manchester’s Town Hall. Burnham has said many times that he believes it is not possible to improve people’s lives unless they have a secure roof over their head. But his experience in Greater Manchester has shown him that there are multiple challenges to overcome, few of which can be fixed quickly. No plan will work without tackling immigration The only assumption that can be made is that Burnham feels, as Prime Minister, he has more levers and political capital to end rough sleeping than he did as a local mayor in 2017. A spokesperson for the Refugee and Asylum Participatory Action Research (RAPAR), a charity that works with asylum seekers in Greater Manchester, told The i Paper that collaboration with the Home Office would be key if Burnham is to succeed at a national level. People becoming homeless because they’ve lost accommodation provided by the Home Office is still a “massive” problem in the region, she said. RAPAR says that as soon as a decision on someone’s asylum status is made by the Home Office, the private contractors which provide it – such as Serco – will tell people they are being evicted straight away. Current Home Office guidance says the legal period is 28 days, although in practice support usually remains for longer after the decision. “It can be quite a short period of time, and Serco don’t see it as their responsibility [to prevent someone from becoming homeless],” the spokesperson said. “It’s not easy at all. “The Home Office have the power to change the timescale. It could have an effect, and Andy Burnham will know that because he’s seen what’s happened in Greater Manchester.” Burnham spoke of his anger at the Home Office role in asylum seekers becoming homeless in an interview with The i Paper in 2024. “The Home Office, really to suit its own purposes, has just thrown the problem at local authorities and it’s totally unfair to do that, and let people who are already in a pretty desperate situation in an even worse position,” he said. Burnham has also learned in Manchester that behind the visual presentation of homelessness, such as a person begging for money on the streets, the story may be more complicated. While his new combined authority was offering people A Bed Every Night, Burnham’s police force took a more robust approach to begging during his first few years in power, frequently making use of the Vagrancy Act to arrest people found sleeping on the streets or asking for money. Former Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner pledged to scrap the Vagrancy Act, and this promise came into force shortly before the end of Starmer’s government, meaning that rough sleeping can no longer be criminalised. The benefits headache that looms Homelessness experts have met Burnham’s announcement with enthusiasm. They feel that he has a shot at dealing with spiralling rough sleeping if he can join up the work of the Ministry of Housing with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Home Office. It is understood that Burnham’s hopes his devolution agenda will not only join up inter-departmental working but give local leaders greater powers to effect change in their area. However, one major barrier lies ahead: the Local Housing Allowance (LHA). At present, this has been frozen since Jeremy Hunt was Chancellor. This means that in a growing number of places across the country, the benefits available for people on low incomes no longer cover rents. How Burnham plans to tackle this, while also investing in expensive new council and social homes, remains to be seen. The right-wing think tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), responded to Burnham’s pledge by saying that speeding up private housebuilding is key to ending rough sleeping. As Starmer’s Housing Secretary Steve Reed leaves government, it is unclear whether Burnham will keep his target of building 1.5 million new homes by 2029. Labour is currently on track to miss this.