Andy Burnham has promised, once again, to end rough sleeping, this time from Downing Street rather than from Manchester’s town hall.
He wants, he says, to get every rough sleeper off the streets by Christmas, backed by a £442 million package announced this week. It is, on its face, a noble aim. It is also, given his track record, one that deserves considerably more scrutiny than the warm headlines it has generated.
A Promise He Has Broken Before
This is not the first time Mr Burnham has staked his reputation on ending rough sleeping. As his very first act on becoming Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he launched “A Bed Every Night,” pledged 15 per cent of his own salary to a homelessness fund, and promised, in his own words, to end rough sleeping across the city-region by 2020.
That target came and went. Official figures show the number of people sleeping rough in Greater Manchester fell from 268 in 2017 to a low of around 149 by 2023, but the deadline was missed, and the numbers have since crept back up again, hovering somewhere between roughly 150 and 200 depending on the year measured. In other words, after eight years and a dedicated fund bearing his own name, Mr Burnham left the job with rough sleeping in Greater Manchester roughly where it started, and by his own admission, still rising when he departed for Westminster.
Mr Burnham’s explanation, both then and now, has been that national government decisions, on benefits, on evictions, on the Home Office, undercut what he could achieve locally. It is a convenient defence for a mayor. It is a considerably less convincing one for a prime minister, who no longer has anyone else’s decisions to blame.
The New Pledge, Old Pattern
The shadow housing secretary, James Cleverley, has already made a similar point, arguing there is “little detail” about how the new scheme will actually be paid for or delivered, and reminding voters that Mr Burnham “promised to end rough sleeping while Manchester mayor and failed because he didn’t do the hard work necessary.” Reform UK’s Richard Tice went further, dismissing the announcement as “yet another vague announcement with no substance.”
Even those broadly sympathetic to the aim have voiced caution. The Liberal Democrats’ Gideon Amos warned that “sticking plasters won’t fix the homelessness crisis,” and that without a long-term building programme, people could simply end up back on the streets once the Christmas headlines fade. Shelter’s chief executive, while calling the pledge “game-changing,” still felt the need to press Mr Burnham to follow through on building more council housing, a fairly pointed reminder of promises made and not always kept.
A Genuinely Hard Problem, Treated Like a Press Release
None of this is to say rough sleeping is a simple problem, or that trying to solve it is wrong. The people affected are real.
That is precisely the concern. Ending rough sleeping “for Christmas” has the ring of a headline rather than a strategy. Mr Burnham’s own record in Manchester shows that funding announcements and personal donations, however well intentioned, are not the same as solving the structural drivers of homelessness, whether that is the housing supply Shelter is pushing him on, the hospital and care discharge failures Crisis has flagged, or the labour market precarity that has put many on the street in the first place.
Labour has now had this pledge twice: once as a mayoral promise, and once as a prime ministerial one. The first attempt, on the numbers, did not succeed. Voters would be entitled to ask what, beyond a larger budget and a shorter deadline, is meant to be different this time.
