Ending homelessness with £340 million

[stripesorspots]

Genuinely interested to hear views from anyone who knows more about this sector than I do. Is this realistic? Is increased funding the only barrier to ending homelessness? If he couldn’t do it in Manchester, what will be different on a national scale?

We need to clarify the terms. He's not trying to end homelessness with that money. His claim is that he will end rough sleeping.

He didn't manage it in Manchester because it's a very complex problem often related to drug use and mental health problems.

And £340m won't scratch the surface even if eradication was possible.

Ending homelessness needs houses in the right place at the right cost. Over to you Angela.

A close family member of mine was a councillor for many years and worked with teams in our local area who were tasked with dealing with rough sleeping.

It was so so hard, often the individuals involved did not want the services offered usually because they were drug or alcohol users and this was forbidden inside the facilities so they chose to rough sleep instead.

The beds were usually available but you couldn’t force people to use them. It’s a very complex situation.

It would need to provide individual abodes for women if it is to work. Homeless shelters/hostels tend to be very male orientated and are not generally safe places for women.

The Manchester initiative was a victim of its own success. The reduction in rough sleeping was dramatic initially and that attracted homeless people who migrated from other, less well served, locations. A national scheme would remove the need to move around to access effective services.

The really smart thing to do would be to team up with the Homewards Foundation, Prince William’s charity, which is already spending £500k a year and has expertise in this area.

I'm really glad it's up there as a key thing to be tackled. My city is very unpleasant now with the level of obviously drug addicted people on the streets. It doesn't feel like it's been tackled at all in the last 10 years.

Yes huge amounts of money needs to go into drug and alcohol rehab. Teaming up with Williams thing is a good idea.

I think it’s a grand idea, he needs to reopen old barracks for homeless vets. They were good enough when they were in the military so why not now?
That said he will never end it, not unless the money is put into drug & alcohol rehabilitation and more homeless shelters for women not just men.

I'm not sure how this can be achieved if immigration remains as high as it is. Most of the homeless in my town are immigrants (illegal in lots of cases I imagine) and if you housed them then this would be very enticing for other potential immigrants.

As others have said it’s far more complex.

Drug/alcohol and mental health needs - which isn’t a quick cheap costs needs to be addressed first.

As ever though we are in fire fighting mode,
where as if we tackled the issues long before it got to this stage. Invest in social services, mental health services ….but it just won’t happen.

This book was an eye-opener for me in understanding people who persistently rough sleep.

Yes you can do a lot to gather up people who very much don't want to rough sleep. I'd start by targeting care leavers and people recently released from prisons. But can't eradicate completely imho.

That's not quite right.

The greatest success of the Manchester initiative was largely due to COVID emergency measures, after which many people returned to the streets.

The rise in each of the last four years is attributed to the increased cost of living and the more rapid processing of asylum seekers who then have to find their own accommodation.

And it's a strange pledge to start his premiership with because the problem is so complex it will be all but impossible to achieve. It was unnecessary grandstanding and it's likely to come back to bite him.

Homelessness was being tackled in Manchester well before Covid. This is an objective assessment for anyone interested in facts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39e0zjz3j0o?app-referrer=deep-link

“And it's a strange pledge to start his premiership with because the problem is so complex it will be all but impossible to achieve. It was unnecessary grandstanding and it's likely to come back to bite him.”

My interpretation is that he said it as a way of getting everyone else to be more patient. If you are struggling to feed your family and using a food bank you probably think you are at the bottom of society. Burnham mentioning rough sleepers is a message to you that your life could be worse. The new Gov is going to start by helping people at the very bottom and he will get to you but not just yet.

This week has cut a tiny bit off people’s electricity bills and introduced a £2 bus fare cap so a little help. Now everyone struggling to feed families etc will wait for a while for rough sleeping to be eradicated so they can be the next focus and get more help.

I get the argument. I see that's possibly what he was doing except that he also grandstanded with the "I'm going to completely change politics" which I suspect is also going to come back to bite him.

I really hope he can do both, but I also really don't think he'll be able to find the money or the political will.

If he calls an election in the autumn I've no idea who I would vote for!

In the area I work rough sleeping isn't a huge issue and as a result there are plenty resources to address it where it exists. The vast majority of the time the attempts to help rough sleepers are rejected by them because of poor mental health and substance use etc being barriers to them engaging with the support on offer. Giving someone a bed for the night doesn't change the fact that accessing whatever substance they are addicted to is more important to them than having somewhere to sleep.

It's rarely just a housing issue.

If Burnham wants to plough the billions required into mental health services I'm cheering him on all the way, but I doubt that's what will happen.

Hopefully we won’t have the upheaval of a GE in autumn. I doubt he will anyway.

I'm not convinced that everyone who rough sleeps wants a bed in a drop in centre. If I was homeless I'd prefer to live in a tent than stay in a hostel.

I think I'd probably find a place in Scotland out of view and live in a bothy or something.

The problem is the scale of the problem and the fact it costs so much to live a conventional life these days.

We have a small house in France and many rural areas have communes that live in old abandoned homes. They often run market stalls etc....i don't think we have this in the UK....there's no alternative to bricks and mortar as such

There are specialist agencies in this field with decades of experience and research behind them, such as Shelter and Crisis. They have detailed plans and recommendations. If AB wants to achieve this, he won't need to think up his own complex solution. Its already there. He will need to find money, but with the right third sector partnerships it would be as cost effective as possible.

A single rough sleeper represents an entire chain of failures in multiple agencies that are tasked with delivering social care.

It is a very visible - and easy - metric for how well the government is doing it's job.

Hence why it's best ignored.

The fact it's been bought into the spotlight despite the obvious risk of failure is probably more interesting than the media can (or will) explain.

That is a very valid point. I'm in my 60s now from my perspective it all went wrong when we started selling council houses and turned homes into profits.

There was a time when people didn't get evicted from council homes if they fell behind on the rent. Housing Associations which now owns the majority of social housing will not mess about, they have eviction plans that turf people out in weeks. I've worked in people's homes where people have been forced to have prepayment electric meters and they literally have no money to put the lights on, imagine no fridge, no lights, no heating. Often these people have jobs as well and maybe an unexpected bill came in, they were sick and didn't get paid.

Often the rents are 800 plus per month for small home which from my perspective is too much for someone on a low income. We have to remember that the minimum wage is still very low and it's not just rent, there's council tax and bills....it doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out how easily things can go wrong.

This is why we need a real labour government. We need a change and we need to act like a adults and accept that there are people that genuinely need support.

I'm sure this varies by area but my council couldn't solve the problem with more money. We already have 2 full time staff trying to get the 12 people who rough sleep to go to the hostel. The residual rough sleepers just don't want to do anything different. Accommodation has been offered regularly but for what ever reason they just go back to their tents.

There seem to be deep routed mental health issues but I'm not sure sectioning people to keep them off the street is sensible.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/27/homeless-families-london-temporary-housing-air-conditioning

This why things need to change

Same with ours but with a lot more staff and a lot more homeless. A lot have been previously housed and helped to access universal credit, but ultimately failed to use the housing element to pay the rent they were still responsible for and got evicted. Once that happens they are no longer entitled to social housing

That's true but how much is the rent. Try and put yourself in their shoes, these aren't your run of the mill tenants. They often have problems that we wouldn't be able to fathom.

Abuse, PTSD, drugs, alcohol, poor education....it's not easy to solve.

I think we sometimes forget that a roof in itself is part of the problem....the hard bit is keeping it there and for that you need to understand the person.

You can't solve homelessness without first providing better mental health care.