Can Andy Burnham actually end rough sleeping by Christmas?

A month ago, Andy Burnham stood outside 10 Downing Street and said his ‘first instruction’ as Prime Minister would be to end rough sleeping in the UK.

According to the Chain database, which tracks rough sleeping in London, around 782 people will have made their bed on the streets of surrounding Westminster in the hours after that pledge was made.

The borough consistently records the highest levels of rough sleeping in the UK, standing as a symbol for how seemingly intractable this issue has become.

While numbers in parts of the nation’s capital have been dipping slightly, its street population still hovers close to 4,000 people, according to Chain.

Today, Burnham and his Housing Secretary Angela Rayner have set out their first big target on the road to bringing those figures down to zero: a drive to ensure nobody in England sleeps rough for Christmas this year.

But how feasible is that?

Emma Haddad, the chief executive of homelessness charity St Mungos, told Metro: ‘The ambition is absolutely right.

‘Can it be done? I’d like to say yes. We’ve seen it done before, particularly during the pandemic, where we made a huge difference in bringing people in.

‘Will we have brought in every person sleeping rough by Christmas? I don’t know.’

Unsurprisingly, there are a number of challenges in the way. One is that rough sleepers may choose not to take up the offer for a variety of complex reasons.

Instead of committing to getting everyone off the streets, Emma said the ‘key’ will be ‘to have made an offer to everybody, so that there are choices and options for people’.

The vast majority of rough sleepers would prefer somewhere warm and dry to stay – so how likely is it that a place will be available this festive season for all of those who want one?

Both Emma and the PM have invoked the Everybody In scheme from the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020, an extraordinarily successful effort to get people off the streets during the health emergency.

But the circumstances were, of course, unique. Hotels around the country sat empty due to lockdown restrictions, providing a wealth of self-contained individual rooms.

Emma said she believes it should be possible to find enough ’emergency space’ to make the offer.

She said: ‘There will be some homes that can be brought on stream quickly. There will be communal spaces. There will be empty flats. You know, there will be a mixture of places.’

Housing associations and local authorities often have empty homes that, ‘with a bit of capital investment to renovate’, can be brought to a decent standard, she said, while night shelters could be opened beyond winter.

But ultimately, it’s important to note that the reason the Covid scheme didn’t last is because it was always an emergency measure which could not be reverse-engineered into a permanent solution.

The same will be true of this year’s Christmas scheme. It will not end rough sleeping, as Burnham promised to do last month,

Writing about the new move in the Guardian, the PM wrote: ‘I don’t pretend this is a permanent fix – far from it. It’s not enough just to help people when they fall on hard times.

‘It’s our job to catch people long before they hit the pavement, and that means dealing with the multitude of reasons why someone might be sleeping rough in the first place.’

To achieve that, Emma suggested the Prime Minister should focus on ‘three pillars’. First is emergency measures, such as the one announced today.

Second is early intervention, spotting the warning signs when someone is on their way to becoming homeless and taking better care as they come out of facilities such as prison or asylum accommodation.

And third is addressing the drivers that cause people to become homeless in the first place: unaffordable homes, housing benefit that doesn’t cover the rent, and support for mental health and substance misuse.

‘You address all of those three,’ Emma said, ‘then you’ve got people off the streets.

‘You’ve prevented more people coming onto the streets or in homelessness, and you’ve switched off the tap that causes that in the first place.’

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