Burnham pledges to end rough sleeping as homelessness rises

Andy Burnham has pledged to end rough sleeping again, reviving a promise he made as Greater Manchester mayor that he did not meet. His new pitch lands against a record that now follows him: official figures showed 154 rough sleepers in Greater Manchester in autumn 2024, up from 149 a year earlier.

Burnham made tackling rough sleeping and homelessness a personal priority in his first term in Greater Manchester, and his allies moved early to set out a route map. In February 2018, Greater Manchester’s Homelessness Action Network produced a draft strategy to end rough sleeping and lay the foundations of a 10-year homelessness reduction plan by 2020. That deadline passed without the target being met, and Burnham’s earlier pledge to end rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020 remained unfulfilled.

The numbers have continued to move rather than disappear. A later count put the number of people sleeping rough in Greater Manchester at 112 in October, about 25% below the 148 recorded previously. Even so, the region’s rough sleeping total had risen for the fourth year in a row by autumn 2024, underlining how quickly short-term improvements can be lost when rents, benefits and local services stay under strain.

Burnham’s national pledge arrives as homelessness pressure builds across England. IPPR North and IPPR warned that homelessness could rise by 25% by the end of the decade without targeted government action, adding about 50,000 people who would either be without a roof over their head or at risk of rough sleeping. That warning points to a wider policy problem than emergency shelter alone.

Downing Street has already treated rough sleeping as a priority, saying the new prime minister would launch a drive to end it at the earliest opportunity. But the Greater Manchester record shows that ending rough sleeping takes more than a slogan. Burnham’s own regional programme, A Bed Every Night, grew from 550 to 600 bed spaces, yet the city-region still struggled to stop rough sleeping from rising again.

For Burnham to make good on the new pledge, the policy burden will fall on housing supply, local authority funding, mental health services and addiction support as much as on outreach beds. Without more social housing and a stronger homelessness system behind it, the promise risks sounding like the one he made in Greater Manchester, and failed to deliver.