The truth about Andy Burnham's Manchester 'miracle' - a homelessness crisis, soaring rents and taxpayers' millions used to fund gleaming skyscrapers: SUE REID

Published: 23:45, 22 May 2026 | Updated: 23:49, 22 May 2026 Deansgate Square is the smart name for four glass towers of glitzy apartments and penthouses poking up into the sky from the streets of central Manchester. The tallest is the highest building outside London, while the estate agents' slick marketing blurb chirps that buyers or renters get a 'superstar' lifestyle with the trimmings of an exclusive gym, private social club and a vista to die for. Views from Deansgate Square are, indeed, spectacular. Looking out beyond the urban sprawl below, you can spy the Pennines and the gentle Cheshire hills. Two miles to the west in Salford is the BBC's media city, dotted with TV studios, pubs, clubs, and chic celebrity-filled wine bars. All very nice for those who can afford the price tag. This week a 61st-floor two-bedroom apartment with allocated parking space was up for grabs at £868,000 with an international estate agent claiming: 'This is the pinnacle of high-rise living in Manchester.' Yet the name Deansgate Square is controversial. For the spectacular towers were built by property developers enjoying loans of £983million from a giant fund championed by Manchester's socialist mayor Andy Burnham to support local building projects and, supposedly, to help ordinary people struggling to buy or rent a home. The Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund was set up with hundreds of millions of pounds in government funding, yet the biggest beneficiary by far has been a single property company, Renaker, which has received 60 per cent, or £600million, of the dosh doled out. The company was founded by an entrepreneur called Daren Whitaker whose net worth of £525million puts him at number seven in the NorthWest's rich list last year, according to the Sunday Times. Yet Renaker has provided no affordable housing at Deansgate Square or among any of the 6,110 homes it has built in Manchester with the fund's money, according to a recent report by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). Andy Burnham launched his Makerfield by-election campaign on Friday But amongst a city dominated by the four glass Deansgate Towers, Burnham's Manchester has the third highest level of homelessness in the country All have been luxury properties and, according to critics of Burnham, many have been snapped up by overseas speculators who hoped to rent them out at eye-wateringly unaffordable prices. All too many now lie forlornly empty. Meanwhile, the city has the third highest rate of homelessness in the country – after Birmingham and London – according to housing charity Shelter. One in 74 residents is without a permanent home, relying on emergency accommodation, sofa surfing or sleeping rough. A headcount by council outreach workers suggests that the number of street-sleepers across Greater Manchester is roughly 150 a night. Homelessness reaches epic proportions in the vibrant city centre, site of the world famous Gay Village set among the canals, where one in 61 people is without a fixed address. In Salford, the homelessness is even worse. One in 29 have no permanent roof over their heads. And these dire figures are going up despite Burnham's many promises to end homelessness in Manchester, a problem fuelled by job shortages and the continuing tide of migrants vying for accommodation. In 2024 Manchester City Council promised 10,000 new affordable homes were in the pipeline, of which a fifth – 791 – have been delivered. But to many waiting this is not quick enough. This week, as the sun put in a rare appearance, the Deansgate towers sparkled in the afternoon light. The marketing suite near the base of the towers, the imposing entrance signposted on street hoardings for miles around, was busy with people guided in by estate agents to view flats for re-sale and rent. But in tiny Hulme Park, a community green overlooked by the towers and surrounded by shabby streets of 1960s terrace houses, a tent could be seen with an occupant who has not been so lucky in life. At the entrance was a jerry can of water. The smell of cannabis wafted through the canvas flaps. But the young homeless man we were told lived there gave only a grunt when we asked his views about his richer neighbours. One in 74 Manchester residents is without a permanent home and reliant on emergency accommodation, sofa surfing or sleeping rough Others have been more forthright. There have been rumblings about the rights and wrongs of the loans fund being used for private apartments – in a city which has a housing shortage – ever since the first bulldozers moved in to build the towers of Deansgate Square in 2015. Now this gossip is back with a vengeance as Burnham, who has made helping the homeless a rallying cry, positions himself to become the next Prime Minister. He is preparing to be Labour candidate for the Makerfield by-election next month, where victory – and a return to the House of Commons – would establish him as a frontrunner for Downing Street. If successful at the polls, there's little doubt that a state housing shake up will come top of his list when he walks into Number 10. Like many a Leftist politician, Burnham has a hatred for what is called the Right to Buy scheme, pioneered throughout Britain's council estates by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1980. She aimed to promote home ownership among the working classes by allowing them to buy their council properties at discounted prices. Millions of tenants have benefited since then, but this has, insists Burnham, catastrophically depleted the state housing stock, helping create a homelessness crisis across Britain. Burnham's own mayoral patch of Greater Manchester has been badly hit. At least 24,000 council homes have been sold off in the past 20 years alone. The result? The number of households on Greater Manchester's housing waiting lists had risen to 86,000 by 2024, provoking a spike in private rental prices which made having a home even more out of reach. This shocking tally has been blamed by Burnham on everyone but himself. He has made it clear that, if he became PM, the Right to Buy scheme in England will be on borrowed time (it is already scrapped in Wales and Scotland). Homeless social housing, called the Embassy Suites, in Manchester city centre Tents pitched by the homeless in Cobourg Street, Manchester, overlooked by a bus operated under Burnham's Bee Network In a recent speech he said the continued sale of social housing is like 'trying to refill a bath without being allowed to put the plug back in'. With his Mayoral cap on, he has already formally requested central government to suspend Right to Buy in areas facing housing shortages, including Manchester. In 2024, he said that 500 social homes were being lost in his city every year. 'There is no solution to the housing crisis without building homes that people can truly afford,' he told the BBC, for a programme which claimed tens of thousands were on Manchester waiting lists that year. Some had been in the queue for a decade or longer. Burnham did not explain why glitzy private tower blocks, financed by public money through a special fund he pioneered, appear to have taken precedence over building affordable housing. The GMCA has claimed the housing fund used to finance these particular blocks was not created for affordable housing, saying: 'The lending criteria for the fund are based on parameters set by central government and we have not turned down a single viable scheme which met those criteria.' But in Manchester, we found the homeless bewildered about the new developments. Daniel Parnell, 47, was not far from the Piccadilly train station. He has been dossing down here in a tent since last year when his relationship broke down with a girlfriend. She remained in their shared house, leaving him without a roof over his head. When I asked him what he thought of Mayor Burnham, he began to laugh. 'I know all about the skyscrapers he built with the help of our money,' he says. 'Why couldn't he have spent some of that cash on social housing for Manchester's homeless? 'Burnham has done nothing for me. The outreach workers sent by the council come once a fortnight and peer at me and ask if I am all right. That's it. I am on my own. What most people living in tents think is that the mayor has been unfair on housing.' Two tents along the row of six on Cotswold Street lives a Romanian who says he is a 'man with no name'. In fact, he is called Eric but his passport with some other possessions he left in a bag outside his tent was swept away by Manchester Council workers. 'I worked for nine years at a plastics factory in Cambridgeshire. Then it closed down and I was given a few hundred pounds and told my job was over. So, I came here early in 2025 and bought a tent. 'I love my people and things are improving there. So, I would go back if I had my passport. Now I am a nowhere man.' But of the homeless I met this week, few are more deserving than 49-year-old Mancunian Jamie Ryan. At 9am, he is sitting on the pavement outside Greggs in Manchester City centre hugging a takeaway coffee in a polystyrene mug which the staff have given him. He is wrapped in a blue sleeping bag and is extremely polite. 'I have no tent, so I go to a place behind the station and lie on the pavement at night,' he says. He used to be a carer for his dying mother Jackie who had a council flat in Failsworth, a deprived but once-proud working-class suburb of Greater Manchester. Daniel Parnell, a former bricklayer and tattooist, next to his tent pitched on grass off Cobourg Street Jamie Ryan, a homeless joiner, sat on the street outside a bakery on Oxford Street, Manchester 'When I lost her 14 months ago, I asked the council if I could take over the tenancy. They said no. I was told to leave, to get out, and have been on the streets ever since.' Jamie is a former joiner, paid his taxes all his life, and would like to join working society again. 'I think my mum's property will have been given to a foreign incomer. It is wrong. I am Manchester born and bred.' In a twist to this sorry tale of two-tier housing, I come across a man called Peter, a father in his forties, who has had the same job in the catering industry for 34 years, has just returned from holiday in Ibiza and is very worried about his 74-year-old mother. On a bench outside Piccadilly Station, he tells me a personal story. Peter's 74-year-old mother bought her terraced council house in a north east Manchester suburb more than 37 years ago under Right to Buy. An NHS nurse (then and to this day), she was proud to have done so. It was a struggle to raise the cash, says Peter, but she was determined to leave the house to her three children, including him, to sell on the open market after she was gone. Now the house's price tag is next to nothing. 'A teenage man on welfare benefits plays loud boom-boom music all night and day next door. The recycling bins given to households by the council are ignored, unused, because there are many new migrant families on her street who don't know what they are for. Dirty mattresses are thrown out, there is shouting, screaming, and worse. My mother is stranded.' Peter wrote to Burnham last year saying that conditions on his mother's street were atrocious. He said she had worked for the state all her life, paid taxes, and was the first in her family to become a house owner thanks to Maggie Thatcher. What was he going to do? He got no reply to the personal email. The problem, he says, is that ordinary Mancunian working people have been pushed to the back of the housing queue. 'This is what Mayor Burnham has done for them – nothing,' he says holding this thumb and forefinger together to make a nought. And when I look at the mighty towers of Deansgate Square which now dominate a city sprinkled with the tents of homeless locals, it is hard to disagree. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. 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