Homeless People Say Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s Rough Sleeping Plan Won’t Work

In his first address as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham made a striking pledge.

Standing outside No 10, the newly installed Labour leader promised to bring rough sleeping to an end.

Setting out his vision for “the kind of Britain I want us to be”, he declared: “Let’s bring back hope.”

Such words may come easily on the steps of Downing Street. They sound very different, however, when heard from the doorway of a law firm in Birmingham city centre.

Especially when that doorway has become your home. That is the reality facing Andrew, 61, a former miner who later battled alcoholism.

“It is never going to work,” he says, with the tired certainty of someone who has heard such promises many times before.

Andrew has spent several years homeless, interspersed with periods in temporary accommodation. None of those placements lasted more than a few weeks.

“They’ll put us in shared houses where people bang on your door at 2am and 4am asking for Rizla or tobacco,” he says.

“It is horrifying — the loud music and the constant disruption. You’ll do anything for a bit of peace, even if that means sleeping rough.”

This is the harsh reality at the heart of Britain’s homelessness crisis. It is a world where the weary scepticism of people who have spent years on the streets sits uneasily beside the optimism of a leader who has only just taken the keys to No 10.

Speak to rough sleepers in the UK’s major cities — as the Mail did recently — and many describe a similar experience.

People recovering from addiction may not want to share accommodation with drug users. Those still using drugs may be unwilling to spend their money on housing. Others simply want to be left alone.

There is also the increasingly difficult question of how to respond to the growing number of foreign nationals sleeping rough each night.

The difficulty of the task, of course, is not a reason to abandon it — and many people living on the streets do want support.

But Burnham has made an unequivocal commitment, whether judged admirable or unrealistic, to end all rough sleeping.

Earlier this week, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner reinforced that pledge, saying she was “very confident” that everyone sleeping rough would be offered accommodation by Christmas.

That promise will provide the standard against which they are ultimately judged.

So, can Burnham succeed against the odds, or will he simply become the next Prime Minister to break a promise made on the steps of Downing Street?

Burnham has backed his ambition with cash – £442million of it, spread over three years.

That includes £102million, announced earlier this month, to fund medical care, addiction support and emergency accommodation to meet his pledge to ‘get everyone in for Christmas’.

The trouble is, few of those he is trying to reach believe he will do it.

Steven Marshall, 62, who is sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, central London, says the Prime Minister is in ‘dreamland’.

Marshall says he chooses to be where he is, and breaks down exactly why.

His Universal Credit was cut from £380 to £340 per month when he was last moved off the streets into shared accommodation.

His £1,050 rent was covered but he had to pay £125 in council tax each month, plus electricity costing £45, leaving him with £170 left over.

‘It’s more affordable to be here,’ he explains.

Bryan, 58, who has been living on the streets of Birmingham for the last six months, is even less credulous.

‘The Prime Minister must be on drugs himself if he thinks that’s going to happen,’ he scoffs.

His objection – heard among many – is not the lack of accommodation, but the nature of it.

‘It is not impossible to get somewhere to stay,’ he says. ‘But I don’t want to be in an HMO surrounded by junkies. If Andy Burnham thinks that’s going to happen, he’s on a different planet.’

Living in drug-addled, shared accommodation is notoriously difficult for recovering addicts who are trying to stay clean.

Others have the opposite problem. Damien, 48, who is sleeping rough outside a Primark in Manchester, says street life feeds his addiction.

He says he spends around £50 a day ‘on heroin, crack and cannabis’, funded mainly by begging.

Damien is living proof of how Burnham has failed before. In 2017, he was elected as Mayor of Greater Manchester on a pledge to end rough sleeping by 2020.

Numbers fell significantly before the pandemic, but have risen every year since 2022 and are now down by only 26 per cent compared to the start of his mayoralty.

When the Mail visited Manchester this week, there were signs a renewed clean-up was under way.

Locals said about ten tents full of Eastern European migrants had been moved on from the outskirts of the city’s trendy Northern Quarter in the last week.

Noticeably, a small encampment next to the proposed site of Burnham’s new ‘No 10 North’ had also been shut down.

It is thought many have been moved to the Etrop Grange Hotel, a Grade-II listed Georgian building near Manchester Airport now pressed into service as an emergency homeless hostel.

But the streets do not stay empty. ‘Homelessness won’t go away no matter what Burnham says,’ Damien says. ‘People have been moved on from the city centre but they just find other places.’

Take the controversy surrounding the clearing of a homeless encampment, made up mainly of refugees from Sudan and Eritrea, near Manchester Town Hall last year.

The camp was originally set up as a protest against the war in Gaza and attracted a mix of activists and refugees who had been granted asylum.

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But as the activists left, the refugees remained, until the city council took legal action to retake land.

A furious row broke out between those who said the refugees had refused accommodation offered to them by the council and campaigners who alleged the authorities had not done enough to help them.

In the end, John Leech, leader of the Lib Dem opposition, branded the eviction a ‘waste of time’ as the tents merely reappeared ‘a few hundred yards away’.

The debacle highlighted another glaring issue that Burnham has so far been quiet on: the rising number of foreign nationals sleeping rough on our streets.

There are currently an estimated 4,793 rough sleepers on any given night in England, according to the official annual count. Of those, around 1 in 4 (1,168) are foreign nationals, with a further 11 per cent whose nationalities are unknown.

The government estimates that supporting the average rough sleeper costs the taxpayer an average £14,204 a year in services including shelter, hospital visits and substance treatment.

That means it could be costing around £16.5million a year to sustain the country’s population of rough sleepers from abroad.

There are two caveats to this. The first is that the cost estimates come from a survey of rough sleepers, but only 18 per cent of those polled were non-UK nationals, so a smaller proportion than the national average.

The second is that many came here legally, worked, but fell on hard times just like anyone could.

But the annual rough sleeping snapshot shows something else startling. The number of non-EU rough sleepers has grown by 396 per cent since 2021.

This reflects broader immigration trends since Brexit.

Josh Nicholson, head of housing at think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), says there has been a shift from largely Eastern European workers, who tumbled into destitution, to asylum seekers who have walked straight out of Home Office accommodation and onto the streets.

Last year, London alone recorded 1,037 rough sleepers whose last settled home was asylum accommodation, according to data from the Greater London Authority.

And 946 people were seen sleeping rough in the capital who were in the UK illegally, while a further 798 had no clear status.

This matters because non-EU migrants are more likely to have restricted or no recourse to public funds, either as a condition attached to their visa or because they are here illegally.

These people do not have access to welfare benefits or local authority housing, so spend their time circling in and out of charity shelters.

A quarterly government snapshot of rough sleeping – separate to its annual count – states that 754 rough sleepers had unknown, restricted or no eligibility for public funds in June this year.

Nicholson, of the CSJ, explains that if Burnham wants to end rough sleeping for good, he would either have to pursue voluntary returns, or extend statutory support to those currently ineligible.

Some on the left have argued that he should do the latter. But this would come at a cost.

There are no official estimates as to what this would be, although evidence suggests longer-term solutions to rough sleeping are cheaper than the current sticking plaster approach.

But others fear expanding eligibility would also risk creating a ‘pull factor’ for further immigration. ‘Everything for free if you come by boat,’ as Nigel Farage put it.

Nicholson says admirable efforts to end rough sleeping must go hand-in-hand with a concerted effort to enforce immigration law.

‘Some people in the sector wince at reconnection work,’ he says. ‘They think it’s right wing. But it is often the most compassionate policy because there is simply no path to a long-term, healthy future for these people in the UK.’

The alternative is a growing underclass of people who are trapped, unable to work, unable to go home, circling endlessly through winter shelters and the pavement.

So, given all this, what hope does Burnham really have?

As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he argued issues beyond his control stopped him from fulfilling his pledge, such as the underlying housing shortage.

Now, as Prime Minister, he can set a national strategy.

He has pointed to the success of the ‘Everyone In’ scheme launched during the first Covid lockdown as proof that it can be done.

But getting everyone in by Christmas is one thing. Making sure they’re not back on the streets by mid-January is another.

Take it from Mark McKay, 50, who is begging in a wheelchair in Birmingham city centre after losing a leg to drug abuse.

‘They are actually good at getting people off the street,’ he says. ‘But then they put them in places where people can’t cope, and they have to get out, and they are back on the street again.’

Burnham, however, appears to recognise this. As part of the £442million programme, £178million has been set aside to deliver more than 1,000 settled homes to get people off the street for good.

Privately, government insiders recognise this is unlikely to be enough, given nearly 5,000 people are counted sleeping rough on any given night.

But Deborah Garvie, policy manager at Shelter, says it is ‘a very good start’, with the expectation of more to come.

Charities have also praised the expansion of the Housing First model, which provides a permanent home and tailored support to address individual needs.

Pilots in England show 84 per cent of service users were still in a stable home after three years, while research by the University of York suggests the programme costs an average of £9,492 per person a year – around a third less than what it currently costs to support someone in and out of temporary accommodation – with the cost supposed to decline over time in line with people’s needs.

Give people a stable home rather than a chaotic HMO and the whole grim cycle could, at last, be broken.

Easier said than done, of course, given the chronic housing shortages – not to mention the difficulties in getting a job – that remain.

But maybe there is hope for people like Aaron Rigby, 37, a former cannabis dealer sleeping on a mattress of flattened cardboard laid out in a Birmingham doorway. Rigby, a former heroin addict, now on methadone, is on the waiting list for a flat.

‘I hope Andy Burnham succeeds,’ he says. ‘But it will be difficult. I want to get off the streets.’

Whether he does or not by December 25 will show whether some promises are easier to make than to keep.

Additional reporting: Ross Slater and Matt Young