Will Andy Burnham get rough sleepers off streets by Christmas? – The Latest

0:00Nosheen Iqbal:This is The Guardian.

0:11What campaigners would say is, look, we've done it. We can do it again. Because obviously we've got the experience from the pandemic, so it's enough money to bring everybody in. It's not just about getting people off the streets. It's about providing the homes. and probably most of all it requires real political will from the top. At the very least we have that. This is the right thing to do. I feel very passionately about this. But even when there is political will, there are massive structural problems.

0:41Nosheen Iqbal:From The Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Noshin Iqbal. Andy Burnham has unveiled his plan to give rough sleepers a route off the streets by Christmas. Patrick Butler, you're The Guardian's social policy editor, and you've been analysing governments do this kind of work for at least two decades. Now, this was a flagship policy for the Prime Minister when he entered 10 Downing Street last month. What exactly has been announced today? Well, what's been announced today is an initiative to encourage local councils to get people off the streets, i.e. rough sleepers off the streets, by Christmas.

1:21So the exact wording he used is councils must give a route off the streets to everyone who wants it by Christmas. This is the first iteration of that flagship policy that you mentioned, which I think he surprised many people. When it was literally the first thing he said when he became prime minister that he wanted to end rough sleeping. so what he said back then was that he would eradicate rough sleeping in England at the earliest possible opportunity so essentially what he's done today is he's starting to say how he's going to meet that original promise that he made a few weeks ago.

2:03Nosheen Iqbal:So Burnham has written in the Guardian today that rough sleeping has become so common that it feels almost like a part of the scenery, which I think is a really ugly truth that a lot of us can relate to. And he argues that his government could mobilise and do the same thing that we saw during the COVID pandemic, in which rough sleepers were taken off the street en masse across the country. Patrick, how possible is this to do in a sustainable way? And what will it look like under the offer that he has made to local authorities? Well, it's definitely possible. I mean, what homeless campaigners would say is that everyone in that was the campaign you mentioned everyone in that was the program that swept up 37 000 people off the streets during the pandemic and it put them in hotel rooms and other forms of accommodation and what campaigners would say is look we've done it we can do it again now i think there are going to be there are obvious problems for a start that was a short-term solution though it was a short-term solution and there are no hotel rooms in the same way that they were then that are available.

3:07I think there's a chronic shortage of accommodation anyway. So what it comes down to, again, is it's not just about getting people off the streets. It's about providing the homes. It's about providing the wraparound support with tenancies and health and employment and addiction. And all that requires investment. And it requires cross-government working and probably most of all it requires real political will from the top.

3:39Nosheen Iqbal:Which at the very least we have. At the very least we have that so that is good but there are a lot of variables here which mean that yes we have done it in the past we should be able to do it in the future but it's going to be tough. What kind of numbers are we talking here because we can all see that rough sleeping in the last decade we can visibly see with our own eyes that it seems to have gone up everywhere across the UK but do you have any sense of what those numbers look like? This is not an exact science so the last set of figures 2025 this is based on the official autumn snapshot where basically everywhere in England sends people out to look on the streets how many people are there yeah for one night so for 2025 that figure was 4793 now if you spool back to 2010 which was the tail end of new labor's uh program to eradicate rough sleeping that figure was 1768 and you can see what happens over the next few years is it goes up you've got austerity it more than doubles um everyone in it comes back down again it's crept back up again it's 4 ,793 but charities would say you know realistically it could be 8 ,000 it could be 15 ,000 right and Burnham I mean it's fair to say he does have a track record here because as mayor of Greater Manchester he pledged to end rough sleeping there Patrick how did that pan out and is it a model that could be replicated across the country?

5:17Well, I think it could. I mean, it's clearly an issue very close to Andy Burnham's heart. If you look at his track record in Manchester, when he started his rough sleeping programme in 2017, I think there were basically 10 people in every 100 ,000 were rough sleeping. He got down to about three people in every 100 ,000 by the time of everyone in. And it's gone back up again since then, but it's still lower. It's about six and a half people per 100 ,000. So I think what Andy Burnham showed is that it is obviously very difficult to eradicate it completely. But you can make significant inroads into doing it.

6:01Nosheen Iqbal:Patrick, why do you think the problem has become so big in Britain? because we are the world's fifth largest economy, and yet we seem to have the worst record on homelessness in the Western world. And of course, that includes the number of people who are living in temporary accommodation. But how did we get here? Talking about the last 30, 40 years, there's probably been, I think we first noticed this in the 1980s, with thatcherism and de-industrialisation and mass unemployment, and that's when we suddenly noticed people sleeping on the streets and I think for a long time of Cardboard City and that sort of thing.

6:37Cardboard City exactly and I think I think in the 80s and 90s there was a gradual realisation that this was not acceptable but it it took a while I think in some quarters the sense that it wasn't the job of the state to intervene here and even when there has been political will and that's from both sides of the political spectrum New Labour made big inroads into this. Eventually, the Conservatives started to act on this and made it a key social policy of theirs in the late 20-teens.

7:11Nosheen Iqbal:That was after the impacts of austerity had kicked in and it had gone up, right? Well, yes. So they'd basically ignored it for seven years and they'd introduced austerity. And guess what? You know, rough sleeping has doubled again. But even when there is political will and you see the Tories very keen to cut rough sleeping, There are massive structural problems. So there's a lack of affordable housing. Rents are really high. They're not covered by housing benefit. Until recently, tenancies were very insecure if you're in the private sector, private rented sector. And all this is against the background of public spending cuts, the austerity that we've mentioned, rising poverty, cost of living.

7:51and those in turn exacerbate problems such as relationship breakdown, families, mental illness, addiction, all of these drivers of rough sleeping. How far these are kind of British problems and not universal problems, I don't know. But these are the very specific British problems.

8:12Nosheen Iqbal:Patrick, Burnham hasn't set a specific target, it seems, for local councils or even a deadline by which all rough sleeping will definitely have ended. Do you see this as a concern or does it still feel like smart, bold politics? Because it is a policy that once it's working, people can see the tangible, visible effects of around them. It is a smart policy. And I think politicians of all stripes have generally recognised that rough sleeping is one of those key social issues that people notice. So you could be an affluent commuter who comes in from the shires and comes out of the station in London and you will walk past a rough sleeper.

8:55So you notice it in the way that you do not necessarily notice the consequences of child poverty, for example. So I think it's recognised by politicians this incredibly visible issue. The Conservatives realised that this was something that they had to prioritise too. So Theresa May set in trains a program to tackle rough sleeping, and that was inherited by Boris Johnson. Keir Starmer said, Will Harvitt, you know, that's much more realistic. Right. I think, but in some ways, I think the targets are, you know, people like me will pay great attention to the targets and say, ah, but you didn't meet the target.

9:34But I think generally the public, they appreciate the effort when it's made in goodwill. And they do notice it. So I think that if they see a material difference on their local streets, they will notice it and they will appreciate it, regardless of whether every last numerical target has been hit.

9:57Nosheen Iqbal:Patrick, as you've said, numerous prime ministers have attempted this. Clearly, it's not easy. But from conversations you're having with charities and campaigners, does this time feel meaningfully different? When you've done this for two decades, you know, you can get quite sceptical. So I think the key, actually, I would say in an optimistic moment, I would say the important thing is they are prioritising this and they are doing it. and they will no doubt make a difference even if they don't meet the target. Which crucially they haven't set. Which crucially they haven't set. They have given themselves some wriggle room here but I think that they will be hoping that in terms of rough sleeping, that visible manifestation of homelessness, there are other manifestations of homelessness which are much more intractable and expensive to deal with.

10:55I think that they think that they will make progress here and I suspect they will make some progress, even if they don't reach the target.

11:05Nosheen Iqbal:We can all hope so. Patrick, thank you so much for your time. Pleasure, thank you. That's it for today. My huge thanks to Patrick Butler, social policy editor at The Guardian. You can follow his work and more on this story at theguardian.com. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest. Today in Focus will be back with you tomorrow morning and The Latest will be back tomorrow evening. This episode was produced by Bryony Moore and Annie Levespa. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin. and it was presented by me, Noshi Mikvall.

11:35This is The Guardian.