Can Andy Burnham end rough sleeping?

“Let us make this the moment when Britain starts to believe again,” he said outside No10. But he’ll understand why people are sceptical; why they don’t go along with this theatre. We have seen the new-PM show before; it’s starting to look more wearisome than elating. Andy Burnham has decided to act as if he had come to power after a landslide, rather than a putsch. If he acts that way, will we believe it? It depends. The question for the governed is a simple one: how much can we trust this guy? When he says stuff, does he actually mean it?

With Boris Johnson it was just noise. With Tony Blair it was considered: he was careful not to promise what he could not deliver. And Burnham? His first firm pledge in his speech outside No10 was to say he “will soon go through that door behind me and issue my first instruction to end rough sleeping in our country.”

A fine sentiment but, surely, an unmeetable pledge. He knows because this was a pledge he made and broke when he ran for Mayor in Manchester in 2017: to end rough sleeping by 2020. Rather than reflect on why he promised something he did not deliver in Manchester, he’s now repeating the gambit on a national scale.

First, the national picture. It surged, fell, and now stands at a record - the way it’s judged is a nationwide, city-wide audit every autumn. Here is the picture from that audit.

In 2017 rough sleeping had surged in Greater Manchester. Burnham pledged to eliminate it. “Within three years, and if we can achieve it earlier, no one should be forced to spend a night on the streets,” he said in 2017. Manchester followed a national trajectory: pre-2017 surge, a 2021 lockdown nadir then climbing again.

So rough sleeping in Manchester doubled since Burnham’s first assault in 2017: hardly a resounding success. Saying he will “instruct” No10 to “end” rough sleeping sounds very good in his speech - but it assumes that this is something No10 can be instructed to do. But while England is back to a record high, Manchester is still ~26pc below the national 2017 peak.

The fall in Manchester was sharper than anywhere else. In the ten-council area of Greater Manchester, rough sleeping was down by 26pc: but it wasn’t ended. It actually went up in Trafford, Oldham and Stockport.

The other percentage change is over smaller numbers. Liverpool went from 33 rough sleepers to 35 over the same timeframe, Birmingham from 57 to 68, Leeds from 28 to 65 and Newcastle from 10 to 46. Manchester City itself fell from 94 to 55. These comparisons require caution: “Greater Manchester” is a sprawling city-region of three million people, whereas the others are individual local authorities. Every figure is an estimate of one particular night. Greater Manchester’s 2025 rate was approximately 6.5 per 100,000 residents, below the English rate of 8.2

People sleep rough for a whole bunch of deeply complicated reasons, and the mix matters if you want to understand why an instruction from a minister does not touch it. Folk sleep rough for domestic and institutional reasons, not financial. Usually the breakdown of a relationship; being asked to leave by family or friends. It could be the end of a private tenancy, or (as I wrote about last week) being booted out of prison, care system, a hospital ward etc.

Running underneath much of it is poor mental health and addiction, both a cause of rough sleeping and a consequence of it. Half of those seen sleeping rough in London last year were recorded as having a mental-health support need, close to a third a drug problem and more than a quarter an alcohol one - and a third had more than one of those three, according to the CHAIN database, the most detailed record we have.

That is why ordering it to stop is hard: except in dictatorships where rough sleepers are imprisoned. A bed is seldom the whole answer. Needs that entrenched are not resolved by a single night indoors; they require sustained, wraparound support that is expensive and slow. Many people decline the communal accommodation on offer - one of the reasons Burnham himself gave for missing his 2020 target - and a shortage of settled “move-on” housing means those who do come inside can cycle back out onto the street.

The Heriot-Watt Uni evaluation of his flagship A Bed Every Night scheme credited it with a “major contribution” to the 2017-20 reduction, but also flagged evictions, poor outcome data and too little permanent housing to move people into as serious weaknesses. And for the rising share of rough sleepers who are not British, the “no recourse to public funds” rule bars councils from offering benefits or housing at all - a legal wall that no amount of mayoral or prime-ministerial will can wish away. Roughly a quarter of England's rough sleepers - and more than half of London's - are immigrants.

So why, knowing this, did he pledge to make his unhittable target for Manchester into a national instruction? Burnham’s Manchester record is creditable: as I say in The Times, a promissory note. But it did not, and he cannot, end rough sleeping. If he had promised to cut England’s 4,500 number to 3,000, I’d be impressed. But end it? He couldn’t do so then and he can’t do so now. So why repeat a pledge he knows he’ll have to break? Or are we to take what he says and discount it by three-quarters? Is there a Boris-style 4x exaggeration factor?

I hope Burnham doesn’t make a habit of this. We have had years of noise, of guff, fairytales, a festival of fine intentions - which breed disappointment. As Health Secretary, Matt Hancock used to speak about a BHAG, a Big Hairy Goal - if you tell the system to abolish rough sleeping they may cut it by a quarter. But why repeat this to the public? Ed Miliband’s dishonest and unworkable pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 corrodes public trust.

Burnham won’t get Britain to ‘believe’ - the country has had enough Prime Ministers offering with ten-year plans (Starmer actually had nine 10-year plans; Boris had six). He will have to speak through delivery. His reshuffle looks good: Healey is a vast improvement on Reeves; McFadden and Mahmood are left in place to continue their reforms. I can see a world in which Burnham delivers - if he can shed his mayoral skin. So let’s hope the rough sleeping pledge is the last unkeepable promise he makes. m