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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/22/andy-burnham-end-homelessness-empty-homes-capping-rents>
"In January 2017, the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, promised
to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020 – a bold, frankly absurd promise
that inevitably didn’t materialise. Nearly a decade later, shortly after
becoming prime minister, Burnham promised to end rough sleeping again, only
this time for the whole of England. So why should we believe him this time
around?
I have interviewed Burnham several times over the past decade. At the end of
2019, when it was clear he had not lived up to his promise, I asked him if he
regretted making it in the first place. “I wasn’t making what you would call a
traditional target,” the mayor said. “I issued my commitment to make it more of
a wake-up call to the system. And I think it has had that effect.” Burnham’s
advisers had told him to tone down the pledge, but he resisted. “The team here
said I should have said: ‘End the need for rough sleeping,’ because you can’t
force people into a shelter … In retrospect, if I had said ‘end the need for’,
that probably would have been a wiser thing to have done. But I wasn’t in the
space of wanting to play semantics with it.”
Official figures showed rough sleeping decreased by two-thirds in Manchester
during his first five years as mayor. There are reasons I can quibble with this
claim. First of all, it doesn’t pass the eye test. Just walk through the city
centre in the early hours, and you’ll find people still bedding down in their
dozens. Second, the statistics on rough sleeping are based on single-night
snapshots, which involve council representatives walking around counting the
people they find rough sleeping. The problem with this is obvious. Third, even
those stats, as unreliable as they are, now show that rough sleeping in
Manchester is three-quarters of what it was in 2017.
But let’s forget all that, and give the prime minister the benefit of the
doubt. Maybe his “promise” was merely a “wake-up call”. He was a metro mayor
after all, and for most of his time in office, he depended on the generosity of
a Conservative government. He simply didn’t have the resources to end rough
sleeping. Let’s also assume that Burnham means what he says. He didn’t have to
make his pledge back in 2017, and he certainly didn’t have to make it on the
steps of Downing Street on Monday.
The difference is that now he has control of the purse strings, so how does
Burnham intend to honour his promise this time around? Initial signs are not
encouraging. After Burnham finished his speech, his new government pledged an
extra £340m, equivalent to £68m a year over five years, on top of the £3.5bn
already allocated, to tackle homelessness. The UK can’t quite agree on how many
rough sleepers there are, but I think a sensible estimate is anywhere between
15,000-18,000 unique people over a 12-month period. So, £68m divided among
18,000 people amounts to £3,777 per head. That’s about four months of rent if
you’re lucky. It’s less a panacea, more like defending yourself from a tidal
wave with a cocktail umbrella.
The government will say it is only targeting 3,000 of the most vulnerable rough
sleepers with this cash, and they will receive closer to £22,000 per head. I
don’t know how one would qualify for the most-vulnerable list. Just how
hopeless do you need to be in the new Burnham era?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
